


Red Sky at Morning

by petrodactyl352



Category: Castlevania (Cartoon), 悪魔城ドラキュラ | Castlevania Series
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Pirate, Angst, Blood and Gore, Booze and blood alike, Canon-Typical Violence, Drinking, Enemies to Lovers, Family Drama, Fluff and Humor, Friends to Lovers, Multi, OT3, Pirates, Polyamory, Pre-OT3, Slow Burn, Swearing, The potc soundtrack was properly abused, Threesome - F/M/M, Vampirates?, Vampire Pirates, Vampire Tropes, and Trevor "Excommunicated Tramp" Belmont, feat. Adrian Fahrenheit "Daddy Issues" Tepes, pirate tropes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2020-10-15
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:00:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 36,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21956272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/petrodactyl352/pseuds/petrodactyl352
Summary: Ever since he was a boy, all Adrian has ever wanted is to follow in his father’s footsteps, to take to the seas and sail at no one’s command but his own. And ever since he found out what happened to his father, all he has ever wanted is revenge. So when he finally gets a chance at both, he feels that perhaps fate and luck are on his side after all.But little does he know that secrets and mysteries shroud the sea that he has loved for so long, secrets about his father and his past. Secrets that make the thin ice beneath his feet crack, threatening to send him into the depths, to drown among the forgotten remains of a shipwrecked life. Now he must choose, between the life he thought he once lived and the life that beckons him toward it.But balanced scales are the easiest to tip, and that one choice can change everything.
Relationships: Alucard | Adrian Tepes | Arikado Genya/Trevor Belmont/Sypha Belnades, Dracula/Lisa (Castlevania), Morana/Striga (Castlevania)
Comments: 68
Kudos: 79





	1. Part One: Current

**Author's Note:**

> merry christmas everyone. :)
> 
> many thanks to [Amiandivh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amiandivh/pseuds/Amiandivh) for the title! and if for some godforsaken reason you would like to see the moodboard i've created for this fic, [feast your eyes.](https://64.media.tumblr.com/c4959403a99ea6e9d8d83b224d6c751f/eb977740a8cf3a1b-d0/s1280x1920/b56043082cfbb97c7472fd75b52e2e8f09cc9788.jpg)

_The waves crash against the hull and he can feel it._

_Feel it through his bones and through his teeth, through his marrow and every vein in his body. He hears it too, hears the dull roar of it and the raw power that it carries in every strike. He’ll be alive so many centuries he knows he’ll lose count one day, but he is sure he will never meet anyone or anything stronger than the sea._

_The ship lists again and he’s thrown against the far wall of the cell they’ve put him in, his wrists chafing together painfully as his body slams into the bars; somehow they’ve looped silver chains around his hands, and the bars of the cell are plated with the stuff. He wonders how many royal cargoes these pirates have raided, how many royal throats they’ve slit and how much blue blood they’ve spilled, to have this much silver at their disposal._

_They’ve filled his blood with it as well, heavy dollops of it pushed into his veins with a syringe. He’s tired and starving, his energy depleting. But these people are fools if they think this can stop him, if they think this is enough to quell him for longer than a day or two. They do not know what he can do, what he has become._

_They certainly have taken their due precautions, however—there’s all the silver, for one thing; they’ve been starving him carefully, with thin, meager portions of sustenance provided to him every other day, sometimes not even that; there are crosses burned into the padlock of the cell, burning his skin if he tries to reach for it. They’ve prepared to hold him here, that much is certain._

_But breaking free will be child’s play. He merely has to wait for the opportune moment to strike._

_Every day at exactly noon a man comes down into the brig, with a glass tube filled with thick liquid silver that he pushes into his veins, dulling his senses and sending him under a temporary haze. He is the only person that he sees, the only real human contact he’s had since they captured him, the only human contact he has as the minutes bleed into hours, which have bled into days, which he knows will bleed into weeks soon._

_It has been long enough. They know what he is, but they don’t know what he can do. They intend to sell him, he knows. Sell his teeth, his hair, his skin and his blood. Send them to alchemists, black magicians, men of the church who dabble in satanism and the occult behind the back of their bishops._

_And they will dock soon. He can feel the currents shifting, giving way, the waves growing and lessening the way it does when there is land nearby. He knows that he cannot let them reach land._

_He hears footsteps descending the steps and goes still, closing his bruised eyes. The smell of silver is heavy in the air, heavy on his skin. It will be even heavier in his blood, but he does not intend to allow it to get there. Not today, and never again. This man will be the first to die._

_He hears him reach the cell, crouching next to the bars, hears the thick clink of glass filled with liquid. He makes no move to throw the man off when he takes his arm, jamming the needle forcefully into his already sore and bruised skin, healed over poorly from the many previous jabs with it and the lack of blood to heal. The man moves to press down on the plunger._

_He opens his eyes._

_The man lets out a strangled cry as he brings his chained hands up, yanking them apart. The chain loosens, and he reaches out faster than the eye can follow, bringing his hands behind the man’s neck through the bars and pulling him forward, the chains digging into his skin._

_The man’s head slams into the bars and he loses consciousness before he can make a sound. He withdraws, dislodging the needle with a careless flick of his arm, then pulls the man closer, feeling his teeth aching, his empty veins contracting, howling for blood. Finally, after weeks, he will have his strength back._

_His fangs sink into the man’s neck and his eyes snap open, another gurgling shout escaping his lips. It should be clean, should be perfunctory almost, taking his blood. But the hunger is too powerful, the darkness in his chest writhing with pleasure and delight as he swallows mouthful after mouthful of it, none of it seeming like it will be enough._

_He sees his vision go crimson, and then he surrenders beneath the vast force of the primal creature he’s become, his teeth sinking in deeper. The man inhales to cry out, but it cuts off into a choked wheeze as he grabs the man’s hair, tilting his head and tearing his throat out with one single jerk of his head._

_The man is dead before all the breath can rush out of his lungs, and fresh blood gushes from the ragged, weeping wound in his neck. He bites again and again, feeling the warm red essence of the man’s life dripping down his face, coating his hands, filling his veins and running over the floorboards, dark and viscous._

_He feels his strength and power returning with each swallow, his fingers slipping on the man’s blood-slicked skin as he drinks. The silver that weighs his blood down begins to thin and dilute, its effect on him weakening until it is nothing but a faint heaviness in his limbs. He has been starving and weakened for so long now that he doubts this man’s lifeblood will give him everything he once had, but it will have to do for now._

_Once there is nothing left to take and the man is but a husk of skin and bone he stands, his eyes opening as he feels the whites of them bleed through, his power thrumming to life beneath his skin. He lifts his hands, gazing calculatingly at the chains that hardly pain him now. He pulls his wrists apart gently and the chain snaps as if it is made of paper, slithering to the floor where they rest with a soft clink._

_He walks to the bars, grasping two of them and forcing them apart. He feels the silver coating them sizzle against his palms but it causes the barest of stings on his skin now; he bends the bars and they come apart with a low groan, breaking apart in his grip. He steps out of the cell, gazing back but once to look at it, the rivers of blood running down the floor and the tightly covered porthole, the dead man lying limp at the bars and the glass tube of silver rolling across the floor as the ship sways._

_He turns and makes his way out of the brig, ascending the steps and stopping at the very last one, breathing deeply; it has been long, too long, since he has felt the moonlight on his skin, felt the salty sea breeze on his face. It makes everything seem clearer suddenly, makes some deep-rooted instinct that has lived inside him since he was a man rear its head and roar its victory._

_The woman standing guard is next. She doesn’t even have time to scream before he tears her neck open with his teeth, spilling her throat onto the decks below their feet. Her eyes roll up into her head as her blood coats his hands, and her limp body falls forward into his arms._

_He can hear the rest of the crew, hear their heartbeats and their breath as they stand at the rail for the watch. He can hear the captain in his cabin, hear his even breathing. They are not lucky tonight. But the ones who are asleep will wake up the next day at dawn to a new morning, a different morning. A red morning._

_He looks down at the woman’s body in his arms, her blood running steadily over his clothes. It would be a shame to waste it all, he thinks, and something almost like a smile pulls at his lips. His fingers tighten around her, weighted down with blood and life, life that is rapidly fading._

_Once her body is little more than a shell he leans down, feeling her blood dripping down his chin, masking the lower half of his face and coating his hands in scarlet gloves till his elbows, black in the moonlight that filters down from the sky above. He bites again, this time gently, something meant to give and not to take. He allows the venom that runs through his teeth to trickle into her veins, filling the empty vessels. She doesn’t wake, but he feels a tremor of something dark and powerful shudder through her._

_He lifts his own wrist to his mouth, tearing the skin open with his teeth. Bright, ruby-red blood that shimmers beneath the moonlight as if crusted with gems runs down his forearm, the wound weeping. Already he can feel it healing, his skin knitting itself back together. Before it can fully heal over he presses his wrist to her parted lips, lips from which one last breath is escaping. He traps it, forcing her to swallow, condemning her to a life of undeath and a life that cannot even be called so. A half-life, perhaps. A damned, cursed life. But what consequence does a cursed life have when it is eternal?_

_Then he lowers her to the ground, straightening. She is entirely limp, and if it isn’t for the venom and blood he knows flows through her veins now, he would have thought she was dead already. But she will wake. And when she does, she will be his to command. The first of his crew._

_He looks up, breathing deeply, though he does not need to; it is more of a conscious, familiar gesture now, something that had once calmed him when he had drawn breath. It’s clear, the sky, not a cloud in sight. The moon is but a curved slice of silver, so slender that it looks like a rip in the endless crushed black velvet of the heavens, the curved blade of a knife insinuated between the stars._

_The captain’s quarters are dark, the lamps doused and the doors firmly shut. Nobody guards it—the Captain is a haughty man, and he dislikes proximity. He does not entirely trust his crew, he knows. He had seen it the very first night they had bound him and thrown him into the brig; he had refused to let any of them search him, doing it himself instead. His gaze had been shifting, suspicious._

_He is not popular with them either, and they have not tried to hide it. Voices filter down sometimes to the cells, and he hears them curse his name and call him a coward, a blackguard, say that he does not honor the code and that he has no fear of the gods and no fear of the sea. Every pirate, no matter how dauntless, should fear the sea._

_Perhaps he will be doing the crew a favor then, by killing him._

_He wills his nails to grow, sharpening into deadly points. He slides his fingers between the doors, finding the latch. It pops open and he slips into the cabin silently, letting the door swing open behind him. He hears the Captain’s breaths, even and shallow in sleep. He does not even sleep with a knife or a weapon, blissfully ignorant of his crew’s mutinous countenance, and clearly arrogant._

_His death will not be swift; he wants to savor this. This man had been the one to slaughter his crew, take his ship, took the stone—the source of his power—and threaten to bring him back to the one place he had sworn never to return to. He has filled his veins with silver and has starved him for days on end, has tortured him and threatened to sell him in the markets of his own home._

_He should have known that his power would have attracted pirates, that word of his newfound darkness would have spread across the seas. But he had not been expecting an attack so soon, mere weeks after he had been born again. He supposes this is his lesson, one he has to learn from. This will be the last surprise, and this man will be the last greedy slaver._

_He is standing above the Captain’s cot, gazing down into his face. Slowly, so as not to miss a single moment of it, he drags a claw down his throat, down his chest and just below his navel. His eyes shoot open as his skin parts, sliced cleanly down the middle, blood spurting. He draws in a breath to cry out but the same blood-slicked nail that slit him up the middle swipes across his throat and he chokes instead, gargling on his own blood, his torn throat spasming._

_His eyes are wide in his face, pale as death. Speckles of blood have splattered across his cheeks, and when his gaze rolls upward and lands on his attacker, his eyes widen even further, and he chokes again. Somehow despite the ragged flaps of his neck he manages to speak, blood gushing from the wound as he does._

_“Y—you,” he gasps, fingers scrabbling at his ruined throat. Blood is everywhere, coating everything, but there is no hunger, not for the blood of a man who has brought him so low. His blood will be like poison in his veins. “It’s... it’s impossible... you were... chained with... silver...” He coughs, and blood sprays the sheets._

_“You are a fool if you think your silly human tricks can work against one such as I.” He gazes down at the dying captain dispassionately, at the sight of him gargling and choking on his own blood. “And an even bigger fool for thinking you could capture me and live.”_

_The captain’s lips part, but all that gushes out is more blood. He gives one last choked wheeze, his dying breath rattling in his chest as he slumps backward. He relaxes slowly, his head lolling to the side, his eyes wide open and unseeing, the blood from his neck slowing to a sluggish pulse, then stopping entirely._

_Carefully, he reaches into the captain’s chest, the wound he had made earlier barely holding his organs in. He removes his heart, slowly, gently. Perhaps he will adorn the bow with the heart of the man who had once captained this ship, for the gulls to peck at. Yes, that will be best._

_He turns and leaves the cabin, moving away from the mutilated body in the bed and the blood on the walls. By the time the doors swing shut behind him he has almost completely forgotten about the captain, unimportant as he was—for now... now, he has a crew to make._

_He inhales the scent of the sea as he stands a moment, letting the moonlight drench him and cleanse him. It feels good to be free._

_He dissolves into the shadows, and leaves nothing but blood and screams in his wake as he exacts his vengeance, carefully, economically almost. The last of the crew have drawn their final breath and open their eyes just as the sun begins to rise, and the first red rays of dawn bleed into the sky._

* * *

His fingers close convulsively around the smooth cool handle of the knife as he jerks upright, a wordless cry scraping past his throat as he swings blindly at an attacker who isn’t there. His breath saws in and out of his lungs, dragging and heavy, and his eyes dart around wildly, expecting to see something, anything—

The world rushes into place around him and his fingers loosen on the knife as his mind catches up with his body. He’s in his room, on his bed, the curtains swaying gently with the breeze cascading off the sea, the salt-sand smell of it filling the room. He breathes it in deeply, feeling his shoulders loosen as he shuts his eyes.

The knife falls onto the sheets and he puts his head in his hands, rubbing at his temples with the tips of his fingers. Every night these dreams fill his head, flashes so vivid that when he wakes he doesn’t know where he is, _who_ he is. He can never remember the dreams, only bits and pieces—the sizzle of burning skin, lines of fiery pain at his wrists, an ache in his teeth that makes his whole body shudder, the taste of blood in his mouth, coating his throat. 

He twists away from it, cringing away from the memories, the visions, whatever they are. His shaking fingers scoop the knife up again as he lies back down, feeling sweat sticking his hair to his nape, his forehead. He tries to get his breathing to slow and his heart to even, but he can still feel the nightmare lingering at the edge of his consciousness, the sweet stench of old memories that aren’t his own. 

They always get worse just before he sets sail, like clockwork. As if something in his blood twists and digs into him, trying to keep him away from the sea, a rope tied beneath his ribs that’s tethered to something, and it’s pulling him—but whether it’s pulling him towards or away from it he doesn’t know. 

Half an hour of gazing at the shifting shadows on the ceiling later he realizes that sleep will continue to elude him. He sits up, sliding his knife underneath his pillow again as he swings his legs of bed, standing. He moves to the window, twitching the rippling curtain aside and gazing out at the moonlight-drenched town outside. 

It’s pretty, here—too pretty sometimes. Quaint, he supposes, with narrow cobbled roads bracketed by little houses that are stacked and sandwiched together, painted bright blues and greens and grays. The color of the sea that crashes against the shore of the town, the color of the heart of this place. 

He can see the shore from here, see the way the waves writhe and curl in on themselves, hypnotized to sway and dance below the moon that pours her light down from the starry heavens. Tomorrow he has to take to those waters, the first time he will be at the helm, the first time he will claim his birthright and sail at no one’s command but his own. 

He gazes out over the churning waves, the endless stretch of the ocean towards the horizon, the mist-shrouded fringes of territory he wants to chart himself, lands no human eyes have ever seen. He wants that, wants to conquer the sea as his father had once conquered it—or so he’s been told. He never knew his father.

Something in his chest catches at the sight of that misty horizon, something about the cold loneliness of it that seems to cry out to him, digging its talons into his heart. He can’t help but think that there’s something out there, lying in wait for him to walk between its teeth and into its maw, though what it is, a force good or bad, or whether he wants to know what it is, he cannot tell.

He swallows, feeling uneasy suddenly, the sea suddenly seeming sinister, off-kilter. The waves seem to curl into demented smiles, the wind howling and shrieking with manic laughter, the tides curving as if to beckon him towards a trap it knows he will fall into.

Abruptly he turns and moves back towards his bed, feeling cold. He turns his back to the window as he attempts to court sleep once more, and when he finally succeeds, his fingers have wrapped fully around the knife beneath his pillow, the hilt colder against his skin than it should be.

* * *

“It’s a fine day, isn’t it?”

The sun beams brilliantly down from the crisp blue sky, cloudless and bright. The wind is brisk but not biting, and the waves are strong but not forceful. It’s ideal for sailing; the weather has attracted dozens of people to the docks, and the wide concave crescent of the shore is dotted with ships, the horizon littered with several more. 

The unease he had felt the previous night has faded almost entirely from his mind, and he remembers nothing of the dream, just as he never does. He’s grown so used to stowing the worry away that he does it almost unconsciously, turning away from the all the unanswered questions and the lingering feeling that he is seeing this place for the last time. 

“What?” He turns toward the man beside him, who has his thumbs hooked into his braces, puffing on a wide, short pipe. 

“I said it’s a fine day,” the man repeats, nodding toward the shore. “You’re a lucky man, Captain. Not everyone starts their maiden voyage on days as crisp as this. The gods must be pleased, or have you in their favor.”

“There is only one God,” is all he says in reply, eyes tracking the bright blue waves as they roll over the horizon, “and He favors no one.”

The man only laughs. “Just you wait till you get home, Captain Țepeș,” he says. “You won’t believe that anymore.”

He turns to the man, whether to ask him what he means or whether to tell him that he’s wrong he doesn’t know—nor does he find out. Someone calls his name and he turns, a hand automatically drifting to his hip, where his sword is tucked into his belt. A tall, proud-nosed man in sweeping black priest’s robes is gliding towards him, looking faintly disgusted at the prospect of being at the docks. It’s admittedly not the nicest part of it, that’s for certain—there are fishermen gutting their fresh catches in plain sight, and men weaving their nets, untangling the thick rope and talking loudly over the general bustle of the crowd. 

“Captain Țepeș,” he says, inclining his head. “The Bishop requests your presence.”

“Now?” He glances back at the _Seafarer_ , the ship nearly readied in the hands of his crew, the sails dropping slowly, billowing outward in the wind. He turns back to the priest and his expression doesn’t change, merely one of his eyebrows lifting. 

“Yes, now,” he says, and there’s the slightest of edges to his voice. “Is there a problem, _Captain?”_

It is all Adrian can do not to sneer, but he manages to nod graciously instead. “None at all,” he says. “Do lead the way.”

He glances back at the man he had spoken to earlier, intending to say something to him, but when he looks back the place he had been standing is empty, the sunlight arcing off the surface of the water winking at him instead. The words stutter and die at his lips, and he feels his brows draw together. 

“Captain, we do not have all day,” the priest’s voice says testily, and he turns, startled. “What? Oh, yes—yes, I’m... I’m coming...”

He gives a little shake of his head and glances back once more where the man had been standing before turning and following the priest away from the docks. “So,” he says, attempting to sound conversational, “did the Bishop tell you of what he wishes to speak to me about?”

“I do not inquire after the private matters of the Bishop,” says the priest distantly. Adrian gives up after that; he’s never liked the priests and deacons the Bishop surrounds himself with, and they’ve never liked him in turn. They’ve always thought he was after their position and favor in the eyes of the Bishop, but Adrian had never wanted to turn to the cloth. Not forever, anyway. He’d loved the sea too much for that. And he still does.

The priest leads him—unsurprisingly—past the church, further toward the port. Adrian has never been inside the church, not once. He’s never been allowed inside, and whenever he’s tried, the priests barred the doors and told him that by order of the Bishop he wasn’t to step inside. It had grown more apparent as he got older, and the few times he had asked after the reason, the priests told him they knew nothing, and that if he wanted to know, he should ask the Bishop.

He’s done that too, on many occasions. He never got answers, and eventually he had stopped asking. But he’s never stopped wondering why.

The priest stops at the tall, lean building that sits at the very edge of the docks, one that hangs over the water. He recognizes it as the place where all the paperwork is done, all the records are kept and the charts are stored. He’s never been inside, though he passes by it every day. 

“The Bishop is expecting you,” the priest says haughtily. “Second floor.”

Adrian doesn’t bother thanking him; he strides away without acknowledging him, swinging himself onto the stairs and loping up three at a time. He’s not even short of breath once he leaps onto the second floor, reaching the top step—where he freezes, arrested at the sight of the room he’s just entered.

It’s devoted entirely to maps and charts, walls papered with them and the entire western wall painted over with a massive map that stretches from the New World in the west to Japan in the east. In the very center lies the Mediterranean, the heart of the world, the center of all land in all its glory. The eastern wall is made entirely of glass, allowing him a bird’s-eye view of the sea, its endless blue waves rippling and churning below the sun. 

The Bishop is standing by the window, his back to Adrian. His arms are looped behind his back as he gazes out over the ocean, and his expression where Adrian can see in the reflection of the glass is remote, dispassionate almost. The harsh light turns his form into a silhouette, the sunlight bracketing his tall, lean form. 

“Bishop?” he ventures cautiously, fingers loosely resting on the hilt of his sword. It gives him comfort somehow, solace, as if merely knowing the blade is there is enough to reassure him. “You wished to see me?”

The Bishop turns, his expression unchanging. The light slanting in from behind him sets his face in harsh, forbidding lines, and again Adrian is hit by that uneasy feeling deep in his gut, one that whispers caution in his ear, telling him there is something wrong, that there is something that’s changed, and not for the better. 

“I did,” the Bishop says, dipping his head in the slightest of nods. His face is as familiar to Adrian as his own, if not more so; this man had raised him, had found him in the burning remains of his home and had taken him in, given him a home and given him a purpose. It was him who had told Adrian about his father, how he had been the best sailor east of the New World and how he had lost his life at sea serving the church as he had all his life. And he had been the one to teach Adrian to do the same. 

“I have something of an objective for you, Captain Țepeș,” he says, moving forward so that he’s standing directly in front of Adrian. “Something I need you to do for me.”

Adrian feels his brows draw together. “I set sail in an hour,” he says. “Wouldn’t an objective be... ill-advised at such short notice?”

“Oh, you will be up to this task,” says the Bishop with a faint smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “I am sure of it. You wished to captain your own vessel, I might as well give you a purpose besides... well.” His smile turns slightly crooked. “Trade. You should be free to chart lands, pursue, obtain.”

“What do you mean?” He tries—and fails, probably—to mask the hesitation in his voice. Something about the Bishop’s knowing smile and the calculating way he’s looking at him makes him feel uncomfortable, exposed almost. 

“Have you heard of the family Belmont?”

Adrian shakes his head, at a loss in the face of such a sudden, out-of-place question. “Yes, of course I have—but I fail to see what this has to do with—”

“Then you know,” the Bishop says, his ringing voice cutting through Adrian’s with ease, “that they were branded heretics by the church, excommunicated for their crimes and their dealings in black magic. And you know how they fled like cowards, taking to the seas, and... _commandeering_ our vessels after we seized their property.”

“They turned to piracy,” Adrian translates. “Yes, I’ve heard.”

“Well, we were under the impression that their line had extinguished itself,” the Bishop says, turning and walking towards one of the maps nearby, mounted on an easel. It shows an intricate positioning of the Black Sea, draining into the Mediterranean. Wallachia’s port is at the center, the surrounding lands outlined clearly. “Died out somehow, ridding us of their stain rather effectively.”

Adrian’s eyes narrow. “But?”

The Bishop heaves a sigh. “But,” he says, “that is rather unfortunately untrue. It seems there is one left alive. A ship was spotted near the coast, one bearing the Belmont family crest. They got close to the port—too close. Before any action could be taken, however, they had disappeared. They went east, towards open sea.” He taps the map, at the slender channel that leads to the Mediterranean. 

Adrian’s eyes never leave the map. “You want me to find them.”

“Yes,” the Bishop says. “Find them, and bring the captain back here so that we may... give him a proper farewell.” He laughs a little and Adrian feels something in his chest twist disagreeably. “No one—not even the Belmonts—can live without God. They brought this upon themselves when they decided to fly black colors on their masts. Death was always waiting on the other side.”

“I already had a charted route,” Adrian protests. “I cannot go on a wild goose chase hunting down some excommunicated pirate.” The word sounds and tastes tarnished and bitter almost in his mouth; his father had been killed by pirates, and ever since he’d found out, he’s wanted to wipe them all out. Leeches, who take what others have and have earned, godless savages. The world would be well rid of them. 

“There is none more fit for the task,” says the Bishop, and yet again his smile doesn’t reach his eyes. “Will this not be fit vengeance for your father?”

Adrian clenches his jaw at the mention of his father, his fingers twitching into fists. He does want to avenge his father, and he does think that what the Belmont family did was cowardly and sacrilegious and disgusting—but something in him doesn’t feel ready just yet, to have blood on his hands. 

“You would be doing this country and our church a great service,” the Bishop goes on, turning his head slightly towards Adrian, affording him a glance of his small, cold smile. “Perhaps it would help you to know that the Belmonts were allies with the filth that murdered your father and even aided in his capture...?”

Adrian feels his breath catch violently in his throat. “What?”

“Yes,” says the Bishop, clearly enjoying himself. Adrian hardly notices; everything seems to be swimming in front of his eyes, indistinct and far away. “I’m sure they all rejoiced at his death, loyal as he was to our cause—as are you.”

Adrian stares straight ahead out the window, watching the waves shimmer and dance, feeling the same slow, hot, powerful rage roll over him that he had felt when they had first told him how his father had died. He had never known his father, but he knows that he had been there for the first few years of Adrian’s life, a warm if not slightly detached presence. The sea was in his blood, the same blood that runs through Adrian’s veins. The same blood that desperately wants revenge. 

“Where was the ship last seen?” he asks. 

The Bishop’s frigid smile widens. “So you will bring the captain back here for the church, as soon as you can?”

 _If I don’t kill him first._ “I will.”

“Excellent.” He sweeps towards Adrian, holding out a rolled up chart. “Take this. You will need to cross beyond the borders of the land you know, and that family has been roaming the seas for nigh on ten years. They know the seas better than you do, though you’ve studied. Maps and charts often cannot give you everything. Bring him back, alive. He must be alive. I don’t care what condition he’s in as long as he draws breath. And return as swiftly as you can.”

“I will,” Adrian says again, stiffly, taking the charts. “I swear.”

“Good,” the Bishop says, and his eyes are cold and hard. Adrian stands straighter, loosing a breath. “What of his crew?”

“Slaughter them, maroon them, drown them, do what you wish with them,” says the Bishop dismissively. “I want only the captain. No one else. Perhaps his First Mate as well, in case he’s managed to breed more of his filthy family.” He looks disgusted by the very thought, and Adrian feels inclined to agree.

“What’s his name?”

The Bishop raises his eyes to Adrian’s, his face hardening. “Trevor Belmont.”

“I’ll bring him to you,” Adrian promises. “As soon as I can.”

“Perhaps if you bring him here soon enough,” the Bishop says, turning away, “after he is tried by the Church for his crimes, you may be the one to deliver justice.”

Adrian swallows, his throat dry. “I will bear that in mind.”

“Go now,” says the Bishop, turning his back to Adrian, “and do not return until you find him.”

Adrian turns, stalking down the steps and into the sunlight. He stops there for a moment, feeling the salty spray of the sea cut through the heat. It should smell familiar and comforting, but now—now all he can smell, hear, feel, see and taste is anger. Anger, and revenge. This is what he was born for. And he will see it done. 

He strides onto the _Seafarer_ , fingers tightening around the charts he’s holding. He spreads them out, gazing hungrily at the lines traced there, the bearings and the latitudes and longitudes that have been plotted. He will find Trevor Belmont, and he will kill him. If it’s the last thing he does. 

“Weigh anchor,” he calls, moving to stand at the helm. “Full canvas.” His eyes fixate on the horizon, his only destination now. Nothing else matters, he thinks as the ship erupts into life around him, shouts and the sound of sails lowering, metal being scraped against metal. Nothing. 

“Where to?” his first mate—a man Adrian doesn’t really _know_ , but was provided with for the voyage, tradition outweighing his preference to sail without one—asks, raising a brow, and Adrian grins, holding up the charts. “We have our heading,” he says. “We go east until we find them, then we go wherever the sea takes us.” He gazes out over the sea, feeling his heart soar—he has a purpose now, something to live for. And he won’t let it go. 

“Tell me,” he says, turning to the man beside him, “what do you know of the family Belmont?”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter is dedicated to [hita](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hita/pseuds/hita), without whom i probably wouldn't have pulled this unfinished doc out and stared at it until i forced myself to write. your comments made me _want_ to write this, which is a miracle in and of itself. thank you so much. *prayer hands emoji*

Trevor can never decide what to do when he docks.

See, on the one hand, he can’t be seen as who he is—a Belmont, an excommunicated heretic, a “user of black magic” and a “practitioner of unholy dealings with the supernatural”, and to top it off, a pirate. If they catch even a glimpse of the family crest that stretches across his back, gleams on his chest and adorns every weapon he carries, he’ll be spitroast in a heartbeat. 

On the other hand, he _wants_ to be seen. 

He’s aware, on some deep and forgotten level of his subconscious and wherever the fuck he’s stowed away his dignity and propriety, that it’s vain. He knows that it’s stupid, and he knows it’s probably going to get him killed. But, as he steps off the gangway and casually strolls along the docks at Dranova—another risk, docking here at the place where every piece of shit in the Black Sea manages to drift to—he can hardly bring himself to care.

But he’s desperate. Now more than ever. He knows it was a stupid fucking move to go home (if he can even call Wallachia home now, after so many years; still, it’s a bit of sentimentality he clings to, occasionally checking on the place and allowing his gaze to linger on it for just a little while before turning away, a bitter taste in his mouth), and an even stupider fucking move to get within ten leagues of the port. The _royal_ port. Where the church prowls like a watchdog. 

It had been too wild and optimistic a fantasy to hope they hadn’t seen him, so he had assumed they’d seen him and promptly turned tail, heading back out towards more open sea, where he’s spent most of his life up until now. He knows they’ll send someone to hunt him down. They always do, drunk with their own power and their sense of righteousness and the fact that they have risen from thinking they represent God to thinking they are. 

More than half his crew had bailed in the last few days, clearly not wanting to get on the church’s... well, worse side. He’d taken one look at their fear-stricken, pale faces, and told them they could leave if they wanted to. Keeping them on board despite their fear and ignoring their pleas is as good as slavery to him—and fuck, does he have some choice words to say to the church about slavery—

He tenses as he feels eyes turn to him as he walks, tracking his every move, their gazes lingering too long on the flash of gold on his chest and the crest on his back that may well be a target painted onto him, for all the good it does him. He doesn’t falter, still walking with just enough purpose and arrogance that nobody will try to stop him. 

He’s usually safe here, on Dranova. The people here know him, have practically watched him grow up, from the day he washed up here, young and starving and bleeding, his face slashed open and festering with infection. They’d healed him and fixed his eye up as best as they had been able to—and while he still has the scar to show for it, it’s a badge of honor for him, something he wears as proudly as his family crest. A reminder, and a warning. It might bring back bad memories of fire and blood and hearing his family’s screams, being a helpless boy unable to do anything but run and never look back—but it teaches him not to dwell on the past. It also reminds him that he owes these people, the people who helped him and healed him and hid him, owes them almost everything. 

Which is why he’s got to get off Dranova as fast as possible. 

He knows the church isn’t far behind him, and that they’ve been looking for an excuse to burn this island to the ground for years. Overrun with pirates, teeming with illegal traders and practically choking in stolen goods, wealth, tobacco and pipe weed so strong that it sets the marrow in your bones aflame. If the church catches up with him here, then that’s it. They’re going to clean it all out, and then the one and only haven for pirates south of Wallachia will be gone, and it’ll be all Trevor’s fault. 

The worn wooden planks of the docks give way and turns to hard-packed earth beneath his boots as he turns out of the port and into the city—or if it can even be called so. The Serpent’s Heart is something of an anomaly, as everything on this island is, crowded and bustling and always awake, always alive. It’s less of an actual city and more of a massive black market, one where people had sold and bought and smuggled and traded until it swelled to twice, thrice, four times its original size. Eventually the traders and smugglers had settled, and it had grown into somewhere people could come and live; everyone on Dranova trades in the black market. It’s the only way to make a living, stay out of debt, earn a respectable place in the hierarchy. 

He ducks into the central structure of the Heart, glancing up almost involuntarily as he does so. The huge stone structure that the market has grown around had once been the shell of a great cathedral, since Dranova had once been under the jurisdiction of Wallachia and in extension, the church. It had been too far away from the mainland, however, and controlling it had proved to be too difficult. Eventually the cathedral was abandoned, and the pirates claimed the place as their own. He likes it, the dichotomy of it all and the way the whole place is one living, breathing antithesis—the crosses and angels and stained-glass paintings high above looking down over the dirtiest, roughest, most godless people south of the Black Sea. 

He moves out of the cathedral and into the winding streets, choked with people and traders and drunk men lying in nooks and corners, bottles still clutched in their hands and passed out cold. Houses line the streets, all the windows on every single one boarded shut. Some people nod at him as he passes by, some ignore him, some glance his way and mutter to each other out of the corner of their mouths. Spending most of his teenage years on this island hasn’t stopped the rumors from springing up like weeds and shrooms after a storm, rumors that say that he’s the devil wearing human skin, that he has no name and no home and he merely drifts, that he captains a ghost ship that never docks and never anchors. 

And some rumors say that he’s the last of the Belmonts, that the church had murdered his whole family when he was just a child, that he had just barely escaped with half his life and had ended up here, that he’d seen his childhood home burn to the ground and that the church is still looking for him, the last son of a cursed bloodline. He has a lot of names here on Dranova, to each their own.

Well, he can’t say every rumor they’ve come up with about him is true, but some aren’t too off the mark, really. And while under other circumstances he’d find it hilarious and love the attention and the stares and the whispers, right now he can’t afford any delays. 

He ducks into the tavern that sits at the edge of the marketplace, near a secluded bit of beach whose sands had once been salt-white but have turned gray over years and years of exposure to dirty boots and feet and spit. The water is crystal-clear and untouched, however—Trevor has found that no matter how bold and brash a pirate is, no matter how dirty and uncouth they are, they always worship the sea. Fear it, almost. It’s one of the little things that he’d learned on his very first day on this island. _Whatever you do, do not disrespect the sea. Her vengeance will crash onto thy shoulders hundredfold, and no man has ever escaped her wrath. She will take thy body and thy soul and she will claim it for her own…_

“Well, well, if it isn’t the devil himself,” the bartender says jovially as Trevor walks in, raising a bushy eyebrow as he moves towards the bar. The whole place is mercifully empty, and there are only two men inside, sitting hunched over a table in the corner. “To what do I owe the pleasure, your malevolence?”

“Hilarious,” Trevor says dryly, swinging himself onto a stool at the bar. He debates with himself briefly whether or not to rest his elbows on the bar (which he knows has seen some questionable things in its day), then shrugs and leans against it anyway. “Really, very droll, Percy.”

The other man grins at him, reaching for a tankard. “Some people actually believe it, you know.”

“I’m aware.” He waves the tankard away rather regretfully when Percy makes to set it in front of him. “Afraid I’m here on business,” he says with a sigh, folding his arms and leaning further on the bar. “Can’t afford to drink now.”

“Trevor Belmont, on Dranova for business?” He widens his eyes in mock shock, setting the tankard aside. “Who would’ve thought?”

“Yeah, well.” He looks away. “Desperate times call for desperate measures, and I happen to be extraordinarily fucking desperate.” He leans forward conspiratorially and so does Percy, bushy brows rising even higher. “I was spotted,” he mutters. “By the Church.”

“Lurking around the port and skulking about near the cliffs, no doubt,” Percy says, shaking his head tiredly. He’s one of the few people who knows him, really knows him—has known him since he’d been the one to stitch the cut across Trevor’s eye with a fishhook and thread from a net, and had given him a shot of whiskey afterward to dull the pain even though he’d only been twelve. He sighs. “Why do you do it, Belmont?”

“The lurking?”

“No. Going home. You know it’s dangerous, you know it’s just a matter of time before they see you and you get caught. And yet you go there anyway, whenever you get the chance to.”

Trevor glances down and away, rubbing a finger on the worn, warped wood of the bar beneath his palms. He doesn’t quite know which is rougher—his fingertip or the wood. “It’s—I have to,” is all he says, shortly. “I don’t know why, but I have to.” 

“Well, it seems as though you’ve gotten your last eyeful of the place, seeing as you were spotted this time around,” Percy says, sitting across from him and peering out at him, not without some sympathy. “What will you do?”

“Get off this island as fast as I can.” He exhales. “They’ll track me here soon. I have to leave before they can find me here and burn the Heart to the ground. I need a crew, Percy. Everyone else bailed. Everyone.”

“Well, I don’t blame them,” Percy says stubbornly, folding his burly arms across his equally burly chest. “If I was on your godforsaken ship with a target painted right across the front of it, I would leave too.”

“I need a crew, Percy,” he says again. “I can’t sail without one.”

“I’m aware.”

Trevor raises an eyebrow. 

Percy sighs. “I’ve got a couple of men willing to sail for some coin,” he says reluctantly, scratching at a stray splinter on the surface of the bar. He isn’t meeting Trevor’s eyes. “Might not be your first pick, but they’re willing.”

“I’ll take what I can get, thanks.” He eyes him carefully, but he doesn’t pry, doesn’t ask after his sudden hesitation and the way he seems to be not telling Trevor something. Whatever is worrying him, Trevor is sure he can handle it, and even if he can’t, he doesn’t care; he just needs to get the hell off Dranova, and fast. “When can they be ready to weigh anchor?”

“Nightfall,” Percy says, turning away and busying himself polishing glasses with a rag so filthy Trevor is pretty sure they were cleaner before he started wiping them with it. “I’ll wager they’ll want a decent wage for it as well,” he goes on. “They’re not too used to sailing so far away from the island.”

“Like I said,” says Trevor, slamming both palms down on the bar and standing up, “I can’t afford to be choosy, Percy. Not when the alternative is getting skinned alive, yeah?” He claps the other man on the shoulder, ignoring his uneasy look in Trevor’s direction as he moves to leave the bar. He allows the artifice of blithe carelessness to slide off his face as he turns away, glancing backwards with a frown. He’ll deal with the crew when he has to, whatever the fuck their issue is. It isn’t like he hasn’t dealt with mutinous men before. 

He feels eyes on him as he makes to leave the tavern, and he resists the urge to pull his cape over the gold crest on his chest to hide it. He doesn’t look around either, knowing that doing so will only incite any potential scuffles. He’s gotten his fair share of punches to the face just by looking at people the wrong way. It’s easy to offend people on Dranova. 

He's exactly halfway across the tavern when something steps in his way, effectively blocking his path to the door. He shuts his eyes for half a second, inhaling deeply and forcing a neutral expression onto his face, then looks up at whoever has stopped him. It’s the two men who’d been sitting at the table in the corner, two men he’s never seen before—or at least men he doesn’t recognize, the light from the door crowding their faces with shadow and outlining them in dull light. He squints up at one of them, one whose face Trevor can hardly see owing to the fact that he’s all but covered in ink; swirling symbols, numbers and sigils curl around his eyes and mouth and forehead, his arms, his neck, everywhere Trevor can see. The other man is shorter but no less wide than his companion, one of his eyes glowing an eerie blue, the other a brown so dark it’s nearly black. 

They’re both glaring at him. 

“Afternoon, boys.” Trevor places a hand at his hip, where his whip is coiled, not bothering to be subtle. If they can’t try and hide their clear and obvious desire to kick his teeth in, then neither will he. “Mind getting out of the way?”

Predictably, they don’t get out of the way, the larger of the two men stepping forward instead. “You’re him,” he says, his voice low and gravelly. “The last Belmont. You’re the one with the price on your head.”

 _Price?_ He hides the momentary little burst of shock that the words send down his spine, wiping his face blank and setting his shoulders back casually. Has the church already caught up with him? “A price, huh?” He hooks his fingers into his pockets, half-turning towards the bar to raise an eyebrow at Percy, who avoids his eye, turning away. “You knew about this, didn’t you? The church putting a price on my head?” When he gets no reply, he sighs. “Pirates,” he mutters under his breath. 

He turns back to the two men in front of him. “At least tell me it’s a good number. I’m hardly what one would call a cheap man.”

“Words travels faster than ships around these parts,” the man says, ignoring him—again. “They want you alive. And it’s a pretty price too.”

“Is it now?” His fingers close around the handle of his whip. “What, you have to wrap me up like a present and take me to Wallachia?”

“Five hundred denarii,” the man says, and Trevor’s lips part almost against his will. Even he isn’t sure he’s worth that much. “For you, alive.”

“And when they come here to take me, then what? They’ll destroy this whole island. They’ve wanted to, for centuries now. You sell me to them, you sell Dranova with me.” 

“They’ve promised immunity to everyone on the island,” the man says with a grin that’s a flash of black and yellowing teeth. “They let us free, give us the island, in exchange for you.”

“That’s bullshit,” Trevor says through gritted teeth. “They’re not going to—”

“Shut up,” the man hisses. “Five hundred pieces in gold and silver and immunity for every piece of shit on this island, it’s a fair price to pay for the devil dressed in a man’s skin, isn’t it?”

“For fuck’s sake,” Trevor says bitterly and not without some exasperation, “I’m not—” 

“Shut up!” The man lurches forward and Trevor leaps back nimbly, fingers tightening on his whip as he draws it at last, casting it out almost out of reflex. It snakes outward, a deadly black tongue of leather, striking the man directly across the face with a loud, satisfying crack of impact. Blood flies from his mouth along with a howl of pain—and several teeth as well, which Trevor notes with grim satisfaction as they roll across the floor, trailing bloody streaks. The man raises a hand to his mouth, eyes widening almost comically before he turns back to Trevor, looking murderous. 

“You want to hand me over to the church?” Trevor spreads his arms wide. “Come and get me, then.” 

The man lunges again, and Trevor sidesteps him with ease, sweeping a foot out. He yells as he falls, his momentum sending him down hard. Out of the corner of his eye he sees the other man advance, albeit more carefully than his companion, slipping a knife out of his belt. He steps into Trevor’s line of sight and swings, and Trevor ducks beneath the blade, leaning back an instant later and slamming the heel of his boot down onto the man’s foot. He feels the small bones there shatter and the man screams—Trevor seizes the distraction, spinning around and driving his elbow directly into his jugular, cutting off his breath. 

He chokes and splutters, eyes welling up as he stumbles sideways and slumps to the ground, groaning. The larger of the two men is standing, spitting blood out of his mouth and moving forward again, lips twisted into a rictus snarl. He steps forward and moves as if to throw a punch; Trevor starts to spin away but he feints leftward instead, stepping directly into Trevor’s path and punching him hard in the face. 

He feels his lip split, a brief flash of sharp pain shooting through his face as he lurches backwards, slamming into the bar hard enough for blood to fill his mouth. The man looms over him, grinning a partly toothless grin as he raises his fist again, his knuckles already raw and split from their earlier tryst with Trevor’s face. He swings, and Trevor ducks, angling his body and shoving hard, his shoulder connecting with the other man’s sternum and sending them both sprawling, his whip flying out of his hand. 

He feels a knee drive into his stomach and an elbow connect with his cheek, and hears himself swear, the words half a groan. His fingers fumble at his belt for a knife, but it’s kicked out of his hand a second later, and then he finds himself pinned to the floor by pure force of the man’s brute strength, a knee digging into his chest and a hand around his throat. The man grins at him, blood trickling from between his lips, a wide gash having opened up across his mouth. 

“They said they needed you alive, not undamaged,” he says, bearing down on Trevor further. It’s beginning to get difficult to breathe. “I suppose they’ll have to do with their bounty having no eyes.” His grin widens, and his blood drips onto Trevor’s face. He tries as hard as he can not to gag. Any minute now… “Or his ears. Maybe his nose, too. Won’t be so pretty without them, will you?”

He scrabbles for his knife and Trevor snatches the opening, arching up and spitting his mouthful of blood straight onto his attacker’s face. He lets out a gurgling shout and his grip on Trevor loosens, his hands flying up to his face. Trevor glances down, aims carefully and slams his knee directly between the man’s legs, rolling free of his grip easily once he wheezes and crumples in on himself, letting go of Trevor entirely. He stands, looking down dispassionately at the man pitifully groaning at his feet, eyes screwed shut. His companion is lying a few feet away, his foot twisted at a strange angle.

He stoops, snatching up his whip from where he’d dropped it earlier and looping it in neat coils at his belt again. He turns towards the bar, leveling a cold look at Percy, who has the grace to look ashamed. “If you tell the church, or anyone a single word about any of this, I’ll have your eyes for it,” he says, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. It comes away smeared with blood. “Both of them. And your hands, too.” He looks down at both the men lying on the floor, blood drying on the wood. “Are those men you promised me of the same ilk as these?”

“I can get you good men,” Percy says, a little too quickly. “They’ll work for good coin. I swear.”

“Yeah, except when they work better for five hundred gold coins and the false promise of immunity.” He kicks one of the men hard in the side when he attempts to start getting up, and he falls again with a moan. “They’re lying, you know. If they find me here, then they’ll burn Dranova to the ground. You’ll all be hanged one by one in the town square at Târgoviște, and they won’t bat a fucking eyelash.”

Percy says nothing. 

“I need men, but I need men who won’t sell me out the moment they get a better offer more,” he says, wheeling around and planting his feet in front of the bar. “I get off this island before nightfall, and they won’t be able to lay a hand on any of you. The overseers are too well paid with the right people on the mainland for that. You give me up, and it’s the noose for you all. Which option do you fancy more?”

“I can get you seven men and no more,” Percy mutters, avoiding his eyes. “They’re my boys, work for me now at the docks. They’re hardly the best sailors, but they won’t rat.”

“If they do—”

“They won’t, Trevor.”

“—then I throw them overboard blindfolded with their hands tied,” Trevor finishes, crossing his arms across his chest. “If I’m in an especially bad mood, they go over the rails with cannons tied to their boots, and then it’ll be the Locker for them all.”

“Fine.” He tosses Trevor a coin, heavy and silver. “Just show them this, they’ll know to listen to you.”

“They’d better.” He turns away from the bar, shoving the coin into his pocket. “I’m not thanking you yet, Percy.”

“I know,” he hears Percy say quietly in reply, and he doesn’t wait to hear more before he leaves the bar, reaching into his pocket, where the heavy coin in his pocket brushes against his fingers, colder against his skin than it should be. He yanks his hood over his face, throwing his cape over his shoulders to hide the crest stitched into the cloth at his chest and back. 

It’s the first time he’s ever had to cover it on Dranova, and the realization is a bitter one, souring his mouth as he moves towards the docks. And not for the first time since he’d realized the weight of his cursed name, since he’d watched his family and his home burn to the ground—not for the first time, he hates the name Belmont for the burden he bears because of it.

* * *

Adrian lowers the telescope from where it had been pressing to his eye, a cold circle of metal against his skin. From afar, the island doesn’t look like much, just another spit of land curving around a reef, countless ships docked around it. But, upon closer inspection one comes to realize that it isn’t all it seems to be, or what it plays itself off as; the rock juts outward and curves, carved by centuries of ships chafing its surface and by structures built onto its face into the shape of a crude skull, most of the ships anchored at its mouth like long, grotesque teeth, and every single one of them flies black colors. 

“Get closer,” he says, retracting the telescope, not taking his eyes off the island. “And lower the flags.”

“Captain?” His first mate sounds uncertain. “Lower the flags?”

“Was I unclear?” He turns away from the railing at last, raising an eyebrow coldly, and his first mate looks down and away immediately, ducking his head. Chastised. Berated, almost. It would be pitiful if it isn’t so pathetic. “No, sir.”

“Then do as I say and lower the damn flags.” He moves forward towards the helm, shoving the telescope into his chest as he passes. The other man squeaks out a little, “Aye, sir,” and makes himself scarce, hurrying off the helm to relay the orders. Adrian sighs, glancing up at the bright blue sky, dotted here and there with rolling white clouds. The sun beats down onto him as he moves to the rail, leaning out over the it. The sea beneath the ship is jewel-bright and the slight breeze teases the waves to sway and dance, their crests tipped with white foam. The weather has been perfect for almost the entirety of the last few days, not so much as a single raincloud darkening the sky above their heads. They’d caught sight of the island that morning, and Adrian had known immediately where they were. 

“Dranova,” he murmurs to himself, folding his elbows over the railing and leaning out further. “What a shithole.” Of course the elusive Trevor Belmont would dock here; likely for supplies and men before he’d make himself scarce, fleeing towards the Mediterranean like the coward Adrian already knows him to be. Pirates—they’re all the same, all flea-bitten cowardly dogs who run away with their tails between their legs at the first scent of danger. 

And this island is where they all wash up. Filled to choking with boorish lowlifes, men and women who haven’t worked a day of their lives, people who take and take from people who earn and pay in sweat and blood. They’d swarmed the place like an infestation, chasing away everyone who’d made a living there and claiming the land for themselves. The church and the royal authority had been forced to abandon it, and he’s heard the rumors that they’ve desecrated the cathedral that they’d been building there, that they’ve built whorehouses and black markets selling alcohol and tobacco inside. He’d burn the whole place to ashes if the headmen hadn’t bribed their way to a seat of power too high for him or anyone else to touch. 

They cut through the shallows closer to the island and Adrian glances back at the stern, where the white flags bearing the Wallachian coat-of-arms have been lowered, leaving the signal flags mast empty. He turns back towards the island to judge their proximity to it, then moves towards the helm, where his first mate has a hand on the wheel. 

“Stop,” he says. “We anchor here.”

“Here, captain?” He frowns at Adrian. “Not at the port?”

“Any closer and they’ll know exactly who we are,” Adrian says. “Drop anchor and hoist the Juliet flag.”

The other man looks as if he wants to protest, but a moment later he shuts his mouth and nods, turning away from the helm and hurrying away once more. Adrian grasps the wheel, pushing down and steering the ship starboard before bringing her back around, allowing the anchor to drop where it can catch firmly in the reef spreading around the island’s perimeter. Once she jerks to a complete halt he moves away from the helm, glancing towards the island. Nobody seems to have noticed them yet, and even if they have, they’ve clearly thought nothing of their presence. 

He knows he should have told his first mate his plan, that it’s expected of him and he’s supposed to. But all these men have spent their lives crewing for merchants and traders, not naval commanders. He knows they mutter about him behind his back, they think he’s favored by the bishop and that’s why he was chosen for this task, and he knows the first mate is among them. And why can’t he be bitter about it? He hadn’t even been allowed to choose his own crew, instead being forced to sail with strangers. They don’t trust him, nor does he trust them. Why should he tell them anything?

He descends the stairs from the helm, moving towards the longboats. “Five of you, with me,” he says. “We anchor here and go aboard Belmont’s ship, where he will be alone. We bring him back here, then double back to Târgoviște. Once we’re gone, hoist the Juliet flag—that way nobody will come on board, and they’ll think we have harmful cargo. We won’t be allowed any closer to the island, nor will anyone think strangely of our hovering here.”

The men say nothing, only nod and do as they’re told. He feels a strange kind of pity as he watches them work, scurrying like ants to their respective tasks. It’s of no importance now—soon they will have Trevor Belmont and Adrian will kill him for what he did to his father, and they will return home, and he can be rid of this crew. Perhaps he can cook up some sort of elaborate excuse for Belmont’s unfortunate demise before his trial; self-defense, maybe. Or perhaps that he shot himself once they cornered him, favoring death over capture. 

Either way, no matter what happens, Adrian will make sure that Trevor Belmont does not leave Dranova alive.

* * *

Someone is following him. 

Whoever it is has been tailing him for some time now; he’s felt it nagging at the corner of his eye, like a shadow dancing just out of reach. Trevor keeps a wary eye out but doesn’t stop or slow, moving steadily back towards the docks. Seven men should be enough; the ship isn’t too big, and he knows he’ll be able to manage. How well he’ll be able to manage is another story; he’d been sailing with the same crew for nigh on three years, and to manage without them for the first time in that long will be difficult, and especially in the absence of Grant—his first mate had been the last one to leave, with an apologetic goodbye that had been the first real slap in the face, and the one goodbye that had made him realize that this whole church situation was indeed very, very bad. 

Which is how he ended up on Dranova in the first place.

The streets are as usual, full of people trading and haggling and swearing, and he gets more than his fair share of looks. He ducks his head and glances away, hurrying forward lest anyone recognizes him. He’d probably like to call a lot of these people his friends (or maybe acquaintances), but if he’s learned anything from pirates _about_ pirates, it’s that the only thing stronger than loyalty and honor is money. Which means that any and every one of his “friends” wouldn’t hesitate to rat him out for a fair sum. And five hundred pieces in gold is a fair sum indeed. 

He ducks into a narrow alleyway between two clapboard houses, pressing himself against the wall and making sure the shadows swallow him whole. A moment later a hesitant silhouette passes along the mouth of the alley and he explodes into action, grabbing the person by the front of their cloak and dragging them into the alley. He hears a startled gasp and a cry and feels his brows furrow; he knows that voice, and well. 

He slams the person who’d been following him against the wall of the alley and their hood falls away, revealing a familiar face—large, stubborn blue eyes, a cloud of strawberry-blonde curls, a pale face smattered across with freckles and an expression that’s entirely too defiant for her own good. 

He fists a hand in her cloak, shaking her slightly and glaring at her. She glares right back at him and he bites back a groan and a frustrated oath. Could this situation get any more fucked up?

“Sypha,” he growls.

* * *

Trevor Belmont’s ship is one of the smaller vessels docked at Dranova’s port, anchored a little away from the main docks and off to the side. He’s had the common sense to cover up the Belmont family crest that’s painted in gold across the side with a spare sail, but it doesn’t hide the careful lettering that runs up the hull on the topside near the bow. 

“ _The Morning Star_ ,” Adrian reads aloud, softly. “A pretty name for a pirate vessel.”

“That’s Lucifer’s name, that is,” one of the men says in a hushed voice. “The name of the devil. I heard my fair share of stories about this one—they say he’s the captain of a ship of demons, and that he’s the devil himself incarnate. Wearing the skin of a man the way you’d pull on a shirt or a pair of trousers.”

“No, I heard that he’s the captain of a ghost ship,” says another man, sounding morbidly fascinated by it all, and more than a little complacent. “He sits in his cabin and the ship sails itself. Ropes moving on their own, canons firing by themselves. They say it’s got a soul of its own, and he hasn’t got one.”

“A soul?”

“He’s empty inside, they say,” the man goes on, quietly. “No heart and no soul. Gave it all up when he took to sea. They say when you cut him, he bleeds seawater, that he traded everything human about himself to be one with the sea. His heart’s a dead thing in his chest, the Last Belmont.”

 _That’s ridiculous,_ Adrian wants to say, but he holds his tongue. Sailors like these often hear outlandish tales, and they believe every word of it, no matter how stupid it sounds. But it doesn’t matter. Adrian knows the truth—Trevor Belmont is very much human. And he will bleed blood as red as rubies when Adrian’s sword slits his throat. 

“Four of you, with me,” he says, raising a hand as they draw up to the ship. “We get on. One of you takes the longboat back to the _Seafarer_. Wait there until my signal. Don’t lower the Juliet flag till then, nor will you take the ship anywhere. Keep her right where she is until I say so.”

“Onto—onto the ship, sir?” one of the men squeaks. “ _His_ ship?”

“For God’s sake,” Adrian says testily, “it’s not haunted, nor is it a devil ship. It’s a piece of wood and metal, it’s not going to hurt any of you. Unless you wish for me to tell the bishop that you disobeyed your captain’s orders because you were afraid of a boat, I suggest you follow me without hesitation. Do I hear any complaints, sailors?”

Silence answers him, punctuated only by the lapping of the water against the ship’s hull and the cry of gulls overhead. 

“Good,” he says shortly. “Now board this damn ship before I lose my patience and hand you over to Trevor Belmont so he can deal with you himself.”

He’s never seen four men scramble onto a ship faster in his life.

* * *

“Let me go, you son of a—” Sypha struggles, caught in Trevor’s iron grip. “Get your hands off me!” 

He shakes her again, pushing her further against the wall of the alley, glaring at her. “You were following me,” he says, his voice so low it’s almost a growl. “You’re not as subtle as you think, Sypha.” 

“I could say the same of you,” she says, standing up straight to get directly in his face, which has definitely seen better days; there’s a purpling bruise high on his left cheek, and his lip is split and swollen, blood drying on his skin. “I’m not the one with the price on my head, Trevor _Belmont_.”

He stills. “You know about that.” It isn’t a question.

“Everyone knows about it.” She reaches up, fingers encircling his wrist and attempting unsuccessfully to pry him off her. “They were talking about it in the Serpent’s Heart yesterday, and it’s a pretty enough sum that everyone wants it.”

“Who started it? Who told them about the price?”

“One of the landlords.” She gives up struggling and goes limp, slumping against the wall and breathing hard, watching expression after expression flit across his face, none of them discernible. He finally settles on what looks like desperation, his lips parting. “You think they’re still in contact with the church?”

“Maybe they have ways to communicate, I don’t know. But they want you, and badly enough to get back in touch with the dogs who run this market. And I think that warrants you getting off this island, and now.”

“So why were you following me? Is your tribe in town?”

“We arrived last week,” she says. “And people have been staring at you, you know. You’re not too subtle either, Belmont. You have a ship, yes; but do you have a crew? Do you have a first mate? Do you even have a heading? Was your plan just to run and try your luck?”

“Sypha…” He lets her go at last with a sigh, sagging against the opposite wall and looking away from her. “I’m getting seven men now. I’m going to take what I can and run. I can’t let this place burn for my mistakes.”

“Trevor,” she says.

“Hopefully by the time I get the fuck out of this place they’ll come snooping around, and I’ll be long gone. I’m heading west, out towards open sea, it’s my best bet—”

“ _Trevor._ ”

“—maybe I can make it out of the Mediterranean and out further past their jurisdiction, or I’ll get them to lose me or something, and then I’ll be able to finish what my family started and hunt down Drac—”

“Trevor!”

“What?”

She raises an eyebrow at him. 

He shakes his head even as the realization dawns on his face. “No,” he says. “No, Sypha, there is no way I can take you with me. It’s—I can’t.”

“Why not?” She balls her shaking hands into fists at her sides. “Because I’m a woman?”

“Yes and no.” He sighs, running a hand through his hair the way he does whenever he’s frustrated. It sticks out all around his head in messy spikes, almost endearingly rumpled. A stray lock falls across his eyes and her fingers itch to tuck it back in place “The Code says—”

“You’re going to use the Code to win this argument?” She narrows her eyes at him. “You of all people couldn’t care less about the Code.”

“It’s too dangerous.”

“I can defend myself.”

“If the church finds you, they’ll burn you alive. That’s what they do, Sypha.”

“They’ll do the same to you, only you’ll be at the end of a noose.” 

“The crew will never agree to sail with a woman.”

“I can make myself look like a boy easily enough. And make me your first mate. They won’t be able to get a word in edgewise.”

“I don’t even know where we’re going.”

“I’m a nomad, Trevor. I know my way around the sea even better than you do. Having me on board will be an advantage. I will be an asset.”

“Having nine people on board is unlucky.”

“You’re full of shit.”

He sighs, shutting his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, and she plows on. “The longer we stand here bickering, the closer the church gets, and the closer the people get to claiming that sum. You know that bringing me along is the best chance you have. You’ll be dead in days without me.”

“Fuck,” he exhales. “Fine. Fine, you’re coming with me. But your train—”

“I already told them,” she says. “They know I’m going with you.”

“Oh yeah?” They duck out of the alleyway and onto the streets again, moving quickly towards the docks and where the _Morning Star_ is anchored. “What if I’d said no?”

“I knew you’d see reason eventually,” she says offhandedly, hiding a grin. “Taking me with you is the only really logical option.”

“I may go mad with only you for company,” he says, glancing down at her with a raised brow. “But I guess we all have to make sacrifices to save our own skin—except for you, of course. You sacrifice things to throw yourself headfirst into danger.”

“It is the Speaker way, to put others’ needs before your own.”

“And to show off.”

“That as well.”

They reach the docks and Trevor grabs her arm, pulling her up short. “Wait,” he says. “Percy gave me something to make sure these men will listen to me—hang on.” He digs around in his pocket and draws out a flash of silver that catches the afternoon sun, turning into a searing spark of light. 

“First Mate Belnades,” Trevor says, eyes sweeping across the crowded docks, “it’s time to gather ourselves a crew.”

* * *

“Wait,” Trevor says.

“What is it?” Sypha pauses in the act of climbing aboard the ship, turning to frown at him. The wind blowing in from the sea lifts her robes and teases her hair across her face, lines of reddish blonde striping her cheeks. Her eyes are the same color as the water that glimmers beneath the sun. She’s pulled her hood up to hide her face in shadow, and partly unable to see her face she looks like a young man, her loose Speaker robes hiding the curves of her body. 

“There’s a ship there,” he says, squinting around the _Morning Star_ ’s hull at a solitary man-of-war anchored several leagues away from the port. It looks completely still, no activity at all on its surface. “It’s just… sitting there.”

“They’re flying the Juliet flag,” Sypha says, also peering at the ship. “Leaking dangerous, toxic cargo. We’re not supposed to go near it. Come on, Trevor, it’s time to go.” She turns away, heaving herself up the rest of the way onto the ship, calling out orders to get it ready to weigh anchor. Trevor remains motionless, standing on the docks, staring at that single empty ship. 

Something feels wrong. 

He glances down, at where the water laps gently at the hull of his ship. It smells of oiled leather and metal and something else, something dark and familiar and something he hasn’t smelled for years now. Something unholy and inhuman. Something dangerous. 

The blue-and-white Juliet flag flutters innocently in the breeze, and his eyes cling to it. Nobody he can see is on that ship. It looks completely empty. And something about the man-of-war is intensely familiar to him—the arch of the bow, the wide stern, the tall triple masts and the double rows of guns that he can see running along the side of the vessel. It looks far too sophisticated and elegant for Dranova. It looks like a chartered ship. And around these parts, chartered ships only come from one place. 

“Trevor!” Sypha’s voice calls. “Where are you? We have to weigh anchor now!”

He makes a split-second decision, thoughts and ideas and theories running so quickly through his head that they all seemed to blur together into one long smear. He quickly climbs up the side of the ship, glancing only once over his shoulder at the water below. He stands, looking over at the seven men who Percy had promised him quickly getting the ship ready and Sypha at the helm, calling out orders. Thankfully, none of them seem to have realized she’s a woman—though Trevor knows she’ll need to perfect her disguise as the days turn to weeks and the weeks turn to months. It won’t be easy to hide herself for so long. 

His fingers drift towards his whip. Then he shakes his head, closing them over the pistol at his hip instead. He cocks it carefully, keeping it hidden behind his cape as he moves slowly towards the helm where Sypha is standing. She glances up at him, frowning. “Is something wrong?”

“Yes,” he says softly. “I think we’ve walked right into an ambush.”

She stills, but her expression doesn’t shift. “What makes you say that?”

“That ship over there, flying the Juliet flag,” he says. “They’re anchored awfully close to the port, aren’t they? And if you take a good look at it, I think it’s fairly obvious to one who’s sailed on of those that it’s come from Wallachia. Officially from Wallachia.”

She exhales. “The church caught up, then. They’re quicker than I thought.”

“And smarter. But not quite smart enough.” He grips the pistol tighter. “I know where they’re hiding.”

She swallows visibly, not looking around. “They’re here? On the ship?”

“Yeah.” He knows this ship inside and out; knows every nook and corner and every single hiding place she has to offer. It’ll take far, far more than a simple ambush on his own ship to take him out. “They’re not going to let us leave this port. So I’m going to give the order to do just that, and then they’re going to leap out of their little hiding places and try to shoot us.”

“When will you—”

“On the count of three,” he says, finger hooking tighter over the trigger. Beside him, Sypha tenses. “One…”

His eyes flick towards the barest flutter of movement beneath the steps. “Two…”

Another flicker near the shadow of the figurehead. 

He draws his pistol. “Three.”

* * *

“Weigh anchor!” 

Trevor Belmont’s voice calls out, and the instant it does Adrian moves, spinning out of the shadows behind the helm and drawing his blade. His final command had been the signal, and he sees four other blurs move out into the open, bayonets leveled and aimed at Belmont’s crew. 

Adrian steps forward and finds himself staring down the barrel of a gun. 

For all the trouble his name causes him, Trevor Belmont wears it the way one would wear a badge or a medal—it adorns almost every surface on the ship, in addition to gleaming gold on his chest. He’s dressed head to toe in red and gold, the colors of his family, and his eyes are a vivid blue, the color of the hottest fire and the coldest ice. A scar slices through the left one, faded to pale pink.

He grins at Adrian. “Well, well,” he says. “What do we have here? Five little choirboys on a pirate ship. It’s like a nursery rhyme.” He draws something out of his belt with his other hand, a glimmering black mass of leather coils stamped with the Belmont crest in gold. A family weapon, and one that shouldn’t even be in his hands. It should be ash, like the rest of his family and their weapons. 

“By royal decree,” Adrian says through clenched teeth, “you are to return to Wallachia—”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Belmont snarls, his artifice of cheerful sarcasm shattering instantly. “You’re four men against nine. You’re outnumbered, pretty boy. Now surrender, or _you’ll_ be the first to taste my whip when I shove it down your—” 

Adrian lunges, swinging his blade. Belmont sidesteps it in the nick of time, spinning around and firing. Adrian twists out of the way of the bullet, raising his sword. The bullet lodges itself into the hilt and he steps forward again, only to be blocked by his whip, spooling and unspooling around him like a serpent before its charmer. Adrian feints forward, lunging again at his left shoulder, which he’s left exposed. 

His sword slices through his shirt, drawing a line of blood. He hears one of his men gasp—but his blood is red. Human. As if he could be anything else. He hears Belmont swear, then a black blur strikes his wrist hard, hard enough for him to hear a distant crack. He gasps, fingers freeing his blade, which clatters to the deck at his feet. He tries to make a desperate lunge for it, but a heeled boot kicks it away before his fingers can close over it, sending it skittering away off the helm and down the steps. 

He fumbles a knife from his belt, but Trevor Belmont laughs as he steps casually up to Adrian and strikes him across the face with his pistol, sending him sprawling, the blade flying out of his hand. His back slams into the rail and he slides to the ground, the wind knocked out of him. He can’t see his men, but he knows they’ve been subdued just as he is. “Like I said,” Belmont says, spreading his hands. “Outnumbered.”

“You killed my father,” gasps Adrian. “I’ll—I’ll kill you—”

The grin on his face falters, replaced by a sort of confusion, one that makes Adrian’s vision go red. “Your father?” he asks, blankly. 

“You’ve killed so many,” Adrian pants, “that you don’t even remember all the innocents whose lives you’ve taken—”

“What was his name?” 

He hauls himself up onto his elbows and spits at Belmont’s feet. “Țepeș. His name was Vlad Țepeș.”

Belmont’s face goes entirely slack, his lips parting and his eyes widening. Adrian slides his last blade from his boot, taking advantage of the momentary distraction and making to move forward, his blade aimed for Trevor Belmont’s heart. But even as he does Belmont’s expression turns from surprised and disbelieving to hard, resolving; he lifts his pistol. 

As if time has slowed down Adrian sees his finger squeeze the trigger, the barrel pointed directly at Adrian’s heart. He hears a deafening shot ring out, feels a momentary burst of pain in his chest—and then even that begins to fade as the world around him dims, fading at the edges and turning fuzzy, indistinct. He feels his limp fingers free the blade he was holding, hears his men shouting, and as if from a great distance he registers the clatter of the knife falling to the deck before his body follows it. The last thing he remembers is hearing the waves crashing against the ship’s hull and smelling the salt of the sea before his eyes close and everything dissolves into blackness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> history lesson time:  
> -dranova is an actual island off the coast of romania, but as you probably realized, i took my liberties with what its role was.  
> -the juliet flag is, as you also probably realized, hoisted when a ship is leaking dangerous cargo, and it basically means nobody is supposed to go near it. 
> 
> reviews are, as ever, converted into fuel to keep the writer going. <3


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i have placed a tiny little potc reference in this chapter, partly because the line was really fitting and partly because i am an uncreative hedgehog. not that i have anything against hedgehogs. i am merely an uncreative one.

His mind fades in and out of consciousness and unconsciousness, and what little he manages to process while awake is far away and blurry, his brain interpreting it all in vivid, vague flashes. He feels sluggish, drugged, the world around him fissuring and cracking and breaking into glittering glass shards of unreality, each one tipped with his own blood. All he can hear is the roar of his struggling heartbeat in his ears and the sound of his own ragged, heavy breathing filling up the empty spaces in his mind. He wonders if he is dead and this is all some sort of dream; he’d been shot, hadn’t he? Had he been? He can’t remember… 

_Silver wires around his wrists and dollops of it in his blood._

His wrists chafe together as small, careful hands bind them with something thick and strong, so tightly that he can already feel his hands beginning to go numb. All he can make out of the boy who ties them is his eyes, swimming in and out of focus, the color of the sea—not quite turquoise and not quite blue. The ropes pull and pinch painfully at his skin, and he’s sure that the bonds will be damp with blood soon.

_The captain searches him himself, not allowing his crew to see. He fervently turns out his pockets, tears through the innumerable pouches and bags in his clothes, muttering to himself with a wild, cornered look in his eyes like a rat stealing food from the pantry, greedy little paws searching and tearing and finding. He divests him of his coat and belt, leaving him in only a thin shirt and trousers befitting a paltry thief, taking his dignity along with his belongings._

“Search him,” a familiar voice says. “Take everything he’s got, just don’t strip him.” A moment later a pair of hands—the same hands that had bound his own together, he realizes distantly—begin to carefully search his pockets, slipping beneath his coat and beneath his shirt, warm, soft fingers pressing to his chest and to his back, to his sides and hips and thighs. They’re not invasive, only inquisitive. Gentle, almost. The same hands feel cautiously down his arms and legs, pressing down slightly to search and find. They slip the weapons from his belt and take the compass from his pocket, along with everything else. They don’t take any of his clothes. 

_Iron bars plated with silver, bars he’s thrown against till his skin is raw and his bones ache. A heavy padlock etched all over with holy symbols and crosses, burning his palms when he reaches out to touch them._

He can feel the bars of a prison digging into his back where he's slumped half-sitting on the floor, hard and uncomfortable against his spine. His body is slammed against them hard, every time the damp, unyielding surface he’s propped up on shifts and lists and rocks, and he can feel bruises beginning to blossom across his shoulder blades and back every time it does. His mind is still too weak to keep his body in his own command, and he isn’t even strong enough to lift his head from where it lolls on his chest, his eyes fluttering open and closed, impressions of his surroundings coming and going in vague, blurry smears.

_Hunger rips through him, his veins empty and shrieking. His teeth ache to satiate it, a ravenous emptiness opening up inside him, a chasm no amount of human food or water can fill. He can smell it on the air and on the bars, the scent of human essence and life, life that he longs to extinguish and drown himself in._

His throat feels unimaginably dry, and every time he tries to swallow he winces and moans; his throat feels as if it’s lined with knives and sand, prickling and aching. How long has it been since he’d last eaten? Drank water? If the pain from the bullet in his chest doesn’t kill him, then hunger and thirst might. His body feels so empty that it hurts whenever he breathes, a sharp little stabbing pain beneath his ribs. 

_He feels the currents shifting beneath the ship, powerful and free. The roar and crash of the sea outside seems to be calling to him, whispering his name, coaxing him to break free of his bonds and join her again, feel her power and her strength. He can feel the thrum of her crashing relentlessly against the ship’s hull, and salty spray lashes the boarded-up porthole that is set into the wall above his head._

The light above his head sways in tandem with the rocking of wherever he’s been thrown—it looks like a ship from what little he can see whenever his eyes are open, damp rotting wood and oil lamps and the sound of the sea, the swaying and the smell of salt. It blurs into a sightless blur of white and brown as his eyes open, then close again, his breathing loud in his own ears, pained and raw. 

_Death and blood on his hands, a tube of silver rolling across the floor._

His eyes flutter open again.

_Moonlight on his skin and the taste of blood in the back of his throat._

He gasps for breath.

_The captain’s dying breath, his heart clutched in his hands and his blood drenching the white sheets._

His vision blurs, turning distorted and hazy. The pain is everywhere now—his chest, his wrists, his throat. He can feel what little grasp he had on his own consciousness begin to fade, reality slowly merging into unreality.

_Freedom is a fickle mistress; one he knows to dote upon so that he may tempt her not to leave him. Freedom and cold wind, and a bloody dawn rising over his bloody deeds. A red sky and a red sun, making the ocean beneath them blush. And though he cannot stand in its light he watches it rise, and remembers, and smiles. Sunlight is a small price to pay for eternity._

His eyes close as the pain overwhelms him, making the merciful black wings of unconsciousness wrap him in its inky feathers, the world around him finally fading away to nothing.

_He turns, and steps into the shadows just as the morning rears its head and the sun bursts from the sea and into the sky._

* * *

Sypha gazes into the mirror at her own reflection and bites her lip. 

She had known that she couldn’t wear her Speaker robes for the entirety of the voyage—they’re impractical, and moreover, they’re conspicuous. The men Trevor had picked up at the docks are superstitious as all pirates are, and she knows that they’d never agree to sail with a Speaker on board. Now if they were to come to know that she’s a Speaker Magician _and_ a woman…

Perhaps that’s a truth to tell some other time. Preferably never. But for now, she has simpler things to worry about. Like trying to fit into Trevor’s old clothes.

He had taken one look at her robes and had said, “There’s no way you’re wearing those,” and had promptly ordered her to his cabin, where he’d dug around for a little bit and had scrounged up clothes that he’d long since outgrown, tossing them to her and telling her to get dressed, then locking the door behind him as he left. It feels unspeakably strange to strip naked and change her clothes in someone else’s quarters—and especially when that someone else happens to be Trevor Belmont—but she had forced herself not to dwell too much on it as she’d stepped out of her robes and folded them up neatly, setting them aside. 

She peers at herself now, chewing more voraciously at her lip. The clothes will fit, miraculously (apparently she’s about the same size as Trevor was when he was fifteen), but that isn’t the problem. The problem is that Trevor as a fifteen-year-old didn’t have breasts; Sypha does. 

She hasn’t got the hourglass figure of some of the wenches and prostitutes on Dranova, that’s for sure, but it’ll still be conspicuous if she doesn’t do something about it. She turns away from the mirror and pulls on the pair of trousers Trevor had given her, stitched from tough flexible cloth that thankfully doesn’t cling to her legs. Once she loops the wide leather belt around her hips and tightens it to her liking, she moves around the room, searching for something she knows will do the trick. 

She’s been looking for only a few minutes when she pulls a cabinet below the sink in the bathroom open, her eyes falling on exactly what she’s been looking for. She makes a triumphant little sound as she draws it out, shutting the cabinet and moving once again towards the mirror at the other end of the room. The bandages she’d filched from Trevor’s bathroom are perfect, sturdy but thin, the fabric stretchy and starched and wide. 

She gets to work wrapping it firmly around her chest, exhaling every time she loops it around her front so that it presses even tighter, compacting her figure as much as possible. The cloth is thankfully breathable, and thin enough not to seem too obvious through her clothes. Once she tucks it closed and ties the last end of the bandage off, she looks up, examining the results. 

The cloth sits snugly around her chest, from below her collarbones down to her sternum. It’s not too tight, and she can breathe around it, and while it’ll definitely take some getting used to, she’ll have to manage. She turns to inspect the back and the sides, and once she’s satisfied she stoops, picking Trevor’s shirt up and slipping it over her head. It falls till just past her hips and she tucks it into her trousers, stepping back and mussing her hair up so that it falls across her eyes.

She takes a step back and looks into the mirror again, blinking at herself. She supposes this is the best she can do until she finds something to darken her brows and jaw, but all in all it isn’t that bad; she looks like a young boy, messy-haired and wide-eyed and skinny. It’ll have to do. 

She gathers up her folded robes, pulls on a pair of boots and gives herself one last once-over in the mirror before deeming her disguise worthy enough, moving towards the door with a sigh. She’s halfway across the room when she hears a knock. “Sypha?” Trevor’s voice calls faintly, muffled through the door. “You done?”

She jogs the last few steps to the door, then throws it open in answer. Trevor blinks down at her, taking a step back to take a good look at her. He looks down, eyes traveling slowly upward from her boots to her trousers, up to her hips, then to her chest, then her shoulders…

She’s sure she’s blushing by the time his heavy, languid gaze comes to rest on her face, her cheeks burning. He blinks once, his eyes on hers not wavering. He reaches up innocuously, a hand coming to rest on the doorframe, giving her the illusion of being trapped between his body and the room behind her. “You look good, Sypha,” he says, and it might just be her imagination, but his voice is ever so slightly uneven. His eyes flick across her face, his lips slightly parted. She still can’t read his expression, but the look in his eye makes blood rise hot to her cheeks again.

She looks away a second later, swallowing hard, her fingers tightening on her robes. “Thanks,” she says, and to her utter relief her voice sounds normal, even and casual. “I stole your bandages, by the way,” she adds, ducking under his arm and moving away from his cabin, mostly to escape her abject and frankly ridiculous and unnecessary—not to mention inexplicable—embarrassment. “I thought you ought to know.”

“What? Why?” She hears the cabin doors click shut behind him, hears his footsteps following her as she weaves through the corridors purposefully. She half-turns her head to talk over her shoulder, making sure he sees her raised eyebrow. “Though my robes may make it seem otherwise, I do have breasts, Trevor.”

She hears a startled little cough. “Oh.”

“Yes, ‘oh’.” She stops and turns around in the middle of the corridor, so abruptly that Trevor nearly crashes into her. He takes a quick step back, and to her secret gratification his cheeks are faintly pink. “I can’t room with your sailors,” she says. “Nor will I agree to sleep in the cellars.”

“Yeah, I, uh… have a spare room,” he says as he looks steadfastly at her face and not down at her chest. She bites her lip to stop the smile that threatens to spread across her face as he lapses into mortified silence, merely staring at her with wide eyes. She raises a brow at him, prompting him to go on. “Trevor? The room?”

“Right,” he says a little too quickly, his blush deepening as he turns away. “This way.” She grins to herself as she follows him through the corridors, holding her folded robes to her chest as she looks around. Despite having seen the ship from outside countless times, she’s never been on it, and has to admit she’s impressed; he’s taken immaculate care of it, every single surface gleaming and polished, the wood strong and glossy and the lamps glowing merrily. Everything is primarily in colors of red and gold, and the Belmont family crest is emblazoned almost everywhere the eye can see. He’s dangerously proud of his name—the sort of pride that’s sure to cause him more trouble than it’s worth.

She says nothing of it, however, and there’s a silence that’s almost companionable between them as they walk together along the corridors. She’s known Trevor for years now, ever since they were both teenagers and she’d been on Dranova with her tribe for the first time, having sailed in with them from Spain. She’d been walking around, fascinated by the sheer gracelessness of the place, the chaos of the unabashed way of life of the pirates, when she’d felt someone reaching into her pocket to take the coins her grandfather had given her, tucked into a little pouch. She’d wheeled around and had nearly burned his eyebrows off, and in true teenage-Sypha fashion, had shouted at him until he’d started to look chagrined. 

After that—well, after that she hadn’t seen him again for weeks, until she’d seen him getting beaten to high heaven by a few of the older boys and had rescued him against her better judgement. And while he’d insisted later that he would have been fine despite his two black eyes, bloody nose and one broken rib, she’d known he was grateful. They’d found themselves sticking together after that, and she’s fairly sure now that neither of them had really known why. He’d taught her how to pick locks and how to fire a gun, and she’d taught him to stop drinking every day and earn honest coin. They’d watched each other grow up, turn from scrawny teenagers into not-so scrawny adults—or at least in Trevor’s case. She’d been away for almost a year traveling, and when she’d returned she’d hardly recognized him, for sometime over the last few months he’d turned from a boy into a man, tall and broad-shouldered and handsome enough that she’d found herself staring at him more than she was willing to admit. It had felt strange, parting as children and meeting again as adults.

“Here,” Trevor says, and she shakes off the memories, turning to the door he’s directed her towards. He fishes around in his pockets awhile for the keys, then unlocks the door, opening it and gesturing inside. “This should do.”

“Thank you.” She steps inside, then turns back towards him again. He’s silhouetted against the golden light spilling around him from the lamps outside, his outline gilded with it. The shadows pool between the angles of his face, turning him into a stained-glass painting of light and dark, one of his eyes pale gray in the brightness and the other vivid sapphire in the shadows. 

He’s been her closest friend outside of her tribe for years, but what he doesn’t know—what he can never know—is that she’s loved him for as long as she can remember. 

“Least I can do,” he mumbles, turning away. “Tell me if you need anything, you know where I’ll be. Night, Sypha.”

She watches him go, and once he disappears around the corner, leaving her alone in the corridor she says softly, “Good night, Trevor.”

* * *

In the end, it’s the storm that wakes him. 

He’s pulled suddenly and abruptly from his hazy delirium of darkness and back to reality as a deafening crack of lightning sounds from outside the ship. His eyes snap open just as a boom of thunder rolls through the air, and as he looks around groggily, he hears rain lashing the side of the ship, churning the sea below into a violent, frothy maelstrom that crashes relentlessly against the hull below.

For the first time since he’d been thrown here as if he were nothing more than a sack of potatoes he gets his bearings, looking around and assessing, weighing, understanding—or trying to. He’s clearly in the brig, whose cells are all empty besides his. And they’ve clearly weighed anchor and are God-knows how far away from Wallachia by now, and his men are nowhere to be seen. He’s alone.

He tries to get up, but he’s pulled back down with a jerk when he tries to sit up; glancing backwards and trying to move his hands tells him that his wrists have been bound together and the rope is looped tightly around one of the bars of the prison, making it impossible to move, much less stand. He sits heavily back onto the floor in a heap, legs sprawled and arms tied behind his back, muttering a few choice curses. His back is to the bars, and in extension the rest of the brig, and he’s been tied up facing the wall inside his cell. The porthole he can see directly across from him about six feet off the ground is dark, and stray droplets of rain and seawater cling to its surface outside. 

He’s been sitting and staring at the wall listlessly for a few minutes when he jumps suddenly, the realization and recollection hitting him with an almost physical impact somewhere in his stomach. _Hadn’t I been shot?_ He remembers Trevor Belmont leveling his pistol directly at Adrian’s heart, remembers hearing the shot ring out, remembers feeling it, a momentary burst of pain in his chest before he’d lost consciousness. 

He looks down frantically, searching for a wound he knows should be there. And while there certainly is a ragged hole in his shirt and a bit of dried blood staining its edges, there’s nothing else. Not a blemish on his skin, not even a scar. He shifts, trying to gauge the pain, but even that proves fruitless. It’s as if the wound has simply vanished—a wound that most certainly should have killed him. Judging by the tear in his shirt, the bullet had hit something vital, a lung or even his heart. So how is he still alive?

“What the hell,” he whispers aloud to himself as he looks up again, so softly he can hardly hear his own voice above the howl of the wind and the lashing of the rain outside. It isn’t possible. He should be dead. There’s no way anyone can survive a bullet wound at point-blank range to the chest like that. And he certainly had been shot; he’d felt the pain of it, and moreover the blood on his torn shirt proves it. As far as he’s concerned, he shouldn’t be breathing right now. 

The ship rocks alarmingly with a sudden groan, the waves pummeling the ship and making it list and sway. He’s yanked to the side, held in place by the ropes tying him to the bars, his already sore and bloody wrists chafing against the ropes painfully. His shoulder slams against the cold metal of them and it punches a grunt of pain from his mouth as he rights himself, still reeling from his recent discovery. 

He has to get out of here. That much is certain. 

He curls his hands into fists and pulls against the ropes, ignoring the screaming pain that explodes from his wrists as the ropes bite into the wounds there. He pulls and pulls, gritting his teeth against the ache of it, trying to loosen the knots. He knows his weak efforts won’t do much good against ropes tied by a sailor’s hand, but it doesn’t stop him from yanking again and again, even as he feels the tough fiber of the ropes grow damp with his blood. 

He stops, taking a deep breath and allowing his heart rate to settle back into some semblance of normalcy. Squeezing his eyes shut, he tightens his fists, pulling his wrists apart slowly. He bites his lip, counts to three in his mind, then with every bit of strength in his body, he yanks. 

He hears a loud _snap_ , and a second later he feels no resistance as he pulls his wrists apart, his shoulder blades hitting the bars as his arms finally move freely. He blinks at the wall, stunned, then scrambles forward, bringing his arms through the bars and staring at his wrists, wondering with a sort of detached horror if he’s broken them and that had been the sound he’d heard.

He hasn’t just worked through the knots—he’s broken clean through the rope itself. 

The knots are still firm and tight, weighing down his left hand. But the rope, thick and tough and made of the sturdiest fibers, has snapped as if it were made of paper. His wrists are still angry and bleeding, his skin having given way after possible days of chafing against the ropes constantly. But they’re not broken. Not even sprained, by the way there’s no internal pain when he rolls his wrists, examining the movement. 

What on earth is happening to him?

He gets to his feet, quickly unknotting the ropes and letting them fall off his hands, flexing his fingers and working out the kinks in his shoulders and knuckles. He moves towards the cell doors, reaching through the bars and closing his fingers around the heavy padlock. He withdraws a moment later, taking a few steps back and eyeing the doors with his lower lip caught on his teeth. 

If he had survived a bullet to the chest and had broken through two inches of rope with nothing but brute force, then breaking the cell door down is beginning to sound less and less ridiculous the more he thinks about it. 

He swallows. What’s the worst that can happen? He might get a concussion, or he might dislocate his shoulder. If he tries to kick it down, he might break his foot. But somehow, he doesn’t think that’s what will happen. He exhales, hunches his shoulders before he can lose his bravado, and surges forward.

Half a minute and one broken cell door later he’s creeping up the steps out of the brig, his shoulder smarting faintly. Judging by the snores he can hear as he moves up a few levels to the berth deck, it’s the middle of the night, and the lamps are doused, throwing everything into darkness. He can see shapes and suggestions of the hammocks strung up along the deck, shadows swaying in time with the ship as the storm seethes the waves beneath them. He casts but one look backwards to ensure he hasn’t been seen or heard as he ascends to the next deck, stepping carefully to avoid any creaking stairs. 

The ship is dark, and he can hear the rain pounding against the deck above his head. He moves forward cautiously, jumping at every crack of lightning and wincing every time a floorboard beneath his feet creaks. He stumbles into the walls on either side of him more than once as the ship lists, catching himself with a bitten-off curse every time he does. He feels along their wood-paneled surfaces as he makes his way through the corridors and up the steps to the upper deck, the storm screaming outside drowning out his footsteps and the sound of his breath sawing in and out of his lungs. 

He comes to an abrupt halt in front of the door that leads to the deck, outside which the storm is raging, rain lashing against the glass set into the door. Beyond, all he can see is rain and darkness and flashes of lightning, a storm that will surely tear him to shreds if he dares to make his way overboard. He hangs back, wary, wondering if maybe he should have chosen a better time to make his grand escape. Well, it’s too late now; he has no choice but to brave the storm. 

He grasps the handle and pulls the door open just a crack, the wind screaming and moaning and whistling deafeningly through it. Drops of rain spray onto his fingers, the coolness of it soothing the bite of the ropes that still encircle his wrists like bloody cuffs. He wedges a foot into the open crack, making to pull it open wider. 

“I wouldn’t do that, if I were you.”

He jumps violently, pulling the door shut quickly and turning, pressing himself against it. Standing behind him in the corridor is a young man—a boy, really, probably a few years younger than Adrian—one who seems vaguely familiar to him. The shadows sliding along his face through the glass behind Adrian transform his delicate, almost feminine features into a shifting landscape of black and white as he steps closer, his body language deliberate, casual almost. 

“Don’t come any closer,” Adrian warns, though both he and the boy know it’s an empty threat. “I’m getting off this ship.”

“And going where?” he asks practically. His voice is low and soft, lilting with a rich accent. Spanish, Adrian thinks distantly. “The storm will tear you apart.”

“It doesn’t matter. Anywhere is better than here.” The boy moves another step closer, affording Adrian a glance of his eyes; large and bright, the color of the sea or the sky. He can’t quite decide which, and it’s then that he realizes why the boy is so familiar to him. “You—you’re the one that tied me up.”

“And searched you, yes. You weren’t quite awake for either, but I apologize if I seemed a bit presumptuous; precautions had to be taken.”

“It doesn’t matter, nor do I need to hear your apologies. I’m leaving. I am of no use to you.”

“On the contrary.” He takes another step forward. “You are most important to us, and you have a great many uses. Now step away from the doors; the night is still young, and the storm is wrathful.”

“I don’t care,” Adrian says. 

“How did you escape?” 

Adrian swallows past the metallic taste of panic rising in his throat. “What?”

“I tied those ropes myself. The knots are too tight, you shouldn’t have been able to get out of them. And you were locked in a cell. How are you here?”

“Perhaps your knot-tying skills are not as superior as you boast of them to be.”

The boy raises an eyebrow, the moonlight leaching his skin of color. “Perhaps,” is all he says, and he sounds wry. “But the iron lock on the door of the cell we put you in, I do not have to boast of its strength. How did you get past it?”

“I…” He hesitates a fraction of a second too long. “It is no concern of yours,” he finishes at last, but it sounds halfhearted and reluctant even to his own ears. He reaches behind his back for the latch of the door, his fingers closing around it. “It doesn’t matter how I escaped. I’m getting off this ship, and I’m going back to Wallachia.”

The boy sighs. “I’m afraid I can’t let you do that,” he says in his soft voice, almost apologetically. “I cannot let you step out of that door.”

He sneers with every bit of disdain he can muster, which is a considerable amount. “Go ahead and stop me, then,” he says, and pushes the door open wide. 

The storm surges inside with a low, rushing roar, rain and wind and the sound of thunder and lightning. Finally no longer held back by his weight against the door it’s almost gleeful in its freedom, lashing his back with a torrent of rainwater and spattering the floor halfway down the corridor with it. He’s about to take a step backwards outside and into it when the boy raises a hand in an odd gesture—his index and middle fingers raised together and his other three fingers forming a circle. He closes his eyes. 

He hears a sound in his ears like rushing wind or beating wings—he can’t quite decide which—and a second later something cold and heavy strikes his temple hard. He doesn’t even have time to turn his head to see what had hit him before, for the third time since he’s boarded Trevor Belmont’s godforsaken ship, he feels unconsciousness make darkness seep into the corners of his vision and he blacks out.

* * *

He opens his eyes, and the first thing he sees after his vision swims back into focus is a pair of boots. 

He’s on his knees, hands once again tied behind his back, this time with heavy iron cuffs that will be impossible to break. There’s a hard surface beneath his knees, and he can feel the bruises there, likely from where he’d either fallen or been thrown onto them. His head still aches from the hit he’d taken, making his vision blur occasionally. The room he’s in is full of merry yellow light, and he can still hear the storm outside—which tells him he hadn’t been out for too long. 

He blinks at the boots in front of his face, then tilts his head up to follow the length of them upward. They seem to go on for miles and miles, and he squints as he allows his eyes to move higher past them. A belt that’s composed of far too many loops and attachments and buckles, a cotton shirt so thin he can see skin through it, tanned and scarred. A gold family crest is stitched onto the left breast, a cross surrounded by swirling sigils. There are leather harnesses crisscrossing across a broad chest, holding innumerable knives and blades. He looks higher still. Wide shoulders, over which a dark red cape is thrown, its high open collar affording him an eyeful of the indents of the wings of a collarbone—and then even higher, to a face that’s as familiar as it is unwelcome; messy dark hair carelessly uncombed, an even more carelessly unshaved jaw, and blue eyes with a scar through the left one that are glaring directly at him. 

Adrian tips his head back, shoulders still hunched under the weight of the chains around his wrists. He looks up at Trevor Belmont through his lashes, breathing heavily through the pain and the humiliation of being chained up on his knees at his feet. 

“You…” He swallows past his dry throat. “You dress well, for a pirate,” he manages to rasp. 

Belmont stares incredulously at him for a moment before he throws his head back and starts to laugh, the sound of his mirth filling the room they’re in, deep and rich. Adrian can’t tell if it’s genuine or not, but the grin that remains on his face as his laughter trails away is nothing short of brilliantly false, a razor blade of a grin that’s a flash of white teeth in the murky light from the lamps around the room cast low. He draws a blade sheathed at his waist with the hiss of leather on steel, one whose hilt is red and gold to match the rest of his clothes and in extension, the ship itself. He lowers the sword, leveling it beneath Adrian’s chin, its point resting ever so lightly on his jugular. 

“And you,” he says, “have a smart mouth for a church boy.” He takes a step forward, pressing his blade more firmly against Adrian’s throat. 

“If you want to kill me, just get it over with,” Adrian says through gritted teeth. “Stop playing games.”

“You think this is a game?” He raises an eyebrow, looking down at him. “Think again. I’m being entirely serious. And if I’d wanted to kill you, I would have done it a long time ago. You wouldn’t be here now if I didn’t need you alive.” He sounds almost matter-of-fact, as if Adrian is merely something expendable, something he can use and then throw away. Like a matchstick, or perhaps a toothpick. 

Adrian keeps entirely still even though instinct tells him to jerk away and get answers, not wanting the point of the blade at his throat to nick his skin. “Where are my men?” he asks instead, keeping his voice as neutral as possible. Belmont only shrugs. “Dropped them off a few days from Dranova. Gave them a couple of guns in case the hunger and thirst get too hard to handle.”

Adrian’s lips part almost against his will, a blank sort of buzzing in his ears following the realization and drowning everything else out for a moment. “You—you left them to die? But what about the ship?”

“I’m sure the dogs on the island will realize eventually that the flag you hoisted was worthless,” Belmont says offhandedly. “They’ll put her to good use, don’t you worry.”

“I would rather see her at the bottom of the ocean than in the filthy hands of pirates!” Adrian snarls, rearing up with a jerk. A moment later the cold point of the blade at his throat kisses his skin just barely, forcing him back down, seething. Belmont tuts disapprovingly, pressing the flat of the blade’s edge beneath Adrian’s chin to tilt his face up. “We’ll have none of that,” he says, the words dripping condescension, and Adrian feels white-hot rage spread its scalding fingers down the back of his neck, making his vision momentarily go red.

“You fucking bastard,” he hisses, jerking his head away despite the blade under his chin. He feels the point skid across his skin, leaving a shallow cut across his throat in its wake, one that beads with blood, welling up almost immediately. “You dishonorable piece of—”

“Shut up,” Belmont snaps, the blade digging harder into his throat. “Your men and your ship were of no use to me. They would have been dead weight, so I dumped them the first chance I got. We’re halfway to the Mediterranean by now, and if you try any little stunts like the one you did just now, then you’ll die. There’s nowhere to go but open sea, no land for hundreds of leagues.”

“I’d rather die there than stay here your prisoner,” Adrian says, baring his teeth. “Just kill me, toss my body over the rails. Why would you kill all my men but spare their captain?”

Belmont’s face stills, as if he’s trying to gauge whether Adrian is joking or not. Finally he gives a little shake of his head, lifting his blade from Adrian’s throat and sheathing it once again. “It doesn’t matter. But what we know now is that we can’t afford to tie your pretty hands with something as flimsy as rope.” He crouches down on his knees, their faces now on a level. “How’d you break through it, Țepeș?” he asks softly, a little teasing smile on his face, as if he knows something Adrian doesn’t. “Sudden, unanticipated burst of strength, maybe? Adrenaline?” He raises his eyebrows. “Inexplicable force?”

Adrian gazes at him, uncomprehending. “I… I don’t know,” he says finally. “Maybe the fiber was rotted through.”

“Okay.” He leans closer. “What about the bars? Four solid inches of metal, broken clean at the hinges. How did you get through that?”

He swallows hard. “I don’t know,” he says again. “It was… I didn’t think… I’ve never—” He sighs, shutting his eyes a moment before opening them again. “I’ve never had cause to use this much strength before,” he says finally. “I don’t know how I…” He trails off, then glances down at the ragged hole in his shirt still stained at the edges with blood, the only evidence of the fact that there had been a bullet in his chest. 

He looks up. “You shot me.”

Belmont’s eyes are steady as he looks back at him. “I did.”

“What happened to the wound? Where’s the bullet?”

He shrugs, that same teasing smile tugging his lips upward. “You tell me. Wound to the chest like that, you should have died seconds after impact, right? And yet there’s hardly any blood on your shirt from the wound—if there ever even was a wound. And you were half-awake when my first mate tied you up and threw you into the cells. You remember it, don’t you?”

Adrian stares at him, mouth going dry. “I—I do. But… I shouldn’t. I should have…”

“Died.”

Adrian says nothing.

“And down the rabbit hole we go.” Belmont stands at last with a sigh, glancing back at Adrian with an expression that’s partly something like pity and partly that same knowing smugness he’s been looking at Adrian with ever since he’d woken up. It’s calculating almost, the way he looks at him. Assessing. Weighing. Appraising. As if they are at an auction and Adrian is his lot.

And then he realizes that no, Trevor Belmont does not look at him as if he is something expendable as he’d thought earlier. Not like he is something temporary and something he can get rid of, he amends—but like he is a weapon. Something he can use, yes, but something that is valuable, and more importantly, he looks at Adrian as if he is something that is dangerous. 

“What?” Adrian asks, feeling his eyes narrow. “What do you know, Belmont?”

He hesitates visibly, reluctance pulling at his face for a split second before he schools his features once again into sardonic boredom. “What are you talking about?”

“Belmont.” He glares up at him. “What do you know?”

“I don’t think you want to,” is all he says in reply, turning away from Adrian. “Know, that is.” 

“How would you—”

“Back to the brig for you, I think,” Belmont says, cutting across Adrian as if he hadn’t heard him at all. “This time in a stronger cell, too. Can’t have you breaking all of my doors down; getting those bars replaced isn’t easy. Or cheap.”

Desperation and panic in equal measure rear up in his chest, clawing up his spine. Belmont is already turning away dismissively and moving towards the door, and Adrian knows his last chance at getting any answers is slipping through his fingers with every step he takes. He makes one last desperate grab for it, straightening and clenching his hands in their chains into fists as he calls out. 

“I challenge you, Belmont,” he says, and he freezes halfway to the door, his shoulders tensing. “A good old-fashioned duel. Swords only. Tomorrow, at dawn.”

Belmont wheels around, glaring at him. “What the fuck are you playing at, Țepeș?” he growls. Adrian only shrugs, looking back at him defiantly. “Unless you’re afraid of losing,” he says, and the taunt has the desired effect—Belmont’s shoulders tense even further, his jaw clenching. “I’m not afraid of some church-bred spoiled brat,” he snaps, and Adrian laughs. “Then it shouldn’t be a problem to accept, should it?” he asks.

He doesn’t tone down the glare. “And if you win?”

“Well,” says Adrian, “since there’s no point in asking for my freedom now, seeing as there is nowhere to go, if I win you tell me everything you know. About me, and my father. I know you know something, that you’ve found something out. Otherwise you wouldn’t have kept me alive, and you’re a terrible liar on top of that.”

Belmont hesitates again before shrugging, an oddly sinister look in his eye replacing his earlier defensive glare as he looks down at Adrian on the floor. “Fine,” he says. “Deal. And if you lose, then you go right back to the brig in blissful ignorance.”

“Fine.”

“Great. That’s settled, then.” He turns back towards the door, flinging it open and turning. “Get up and follow me.” Adrian struggles to his feet with the added weight of the chains on his hands and limps over to the door where Belmont is standing, feeling the painful kinks in his knees and ankles work themselves out with audible cracks as he walks. He’s an inch or so taller than Belmont, which he notices for the first time as he draws up to the door where Belmont is standing; he’d been a bit preoccupied the last time they’d spoken. But something about the realization takes him aback a little, and even he’s not quite sure why.

He follows him through the corridors and down the steps again, glancing around at the now-lit ship as they walk. He has to admit it’s beautiful, immaculately taken care of and clean, nothing out of place and everything draped or painted in red and gold. The sky is still dark and churning with the storm as he can see every time they pass an arching window, the glass sprayed with rain and seawater. Slender branches of lightning fork between the clouds with a sound not unlike the crack of Belmont’s whip, booming thunder following close at their heels.

“Shouldn’t one of your men be doing this menial job? Taking the prisoner back to the cells?” he asks, and Belmont grunts. “It’s two in the fucking morning. Everyone’s asleep.”

“Wake someone, then.”

“Sailors work harder than the captain does. They need more sleep than I do.”

“That’s… oddly compassionate of you.”

“I’ll have you know I’m known to be an extraordinarily compassionate man,” he says, and when Adrian glances at him with his brows raised, he sees Belmont grinning at him. “Of course, I’m also known to be a total arsehole, but that’s only to people who deserve it, like pompous blond brats who ask too many questions.”

“I wonder who that could be.”

They both chuckle as they descend the last level and into the brig again, Belmont fishing a heavy iron key ring out of his pocket. He unlocks one of the cells at the far end of the prison, one that looks vaguely different from the others, with the largest, heaviest key. The bars gleam as if polished, the wood paneling the inside of it is lighter, and it’s the only cell without a porthole set into the wall. Belmont opens the door wide, gesturing. “In you go.”

Adrian steps inside, glancing around curiously. Something about it seems… different. 

He hears a loud click as Belmont pops the latch of the lock closed, shutting Adrian into the cell. The moment the door closes between them Adrian shifts, frowning as the faintest of itches rises up beneath his skin, spreading from his chest and across his back. He twitches away from it imperceptibly, wincing, wondering if perhaps something has bitten him. He glances between the gleaming bars at Belmont, who’s watching him almost carefully. “Everything all right?”

He swallows past the discomfort. “I… it’s just—” His eyes catch on the bars, bright and polished. “What are these made of? They look different, almost like—”

“Silver?”

Adrian stares at him. 

He only smiles back, that knowing, disarming smile that tells him that he has the key to every unanswered question in Adrian’s mind. “Dawn is only a few hours away. You might want to get some sleep before then, seeing as you’re the one who challenged me. I’ll send my first mate down to get you when it’s time.” He drops a stunned Adrian a single nod before turning and leaving the brig, his footsteps fading into the air within moments. But Adrian is still standing in the middle of the cell, gazing at the bars that surround him. 

He steps forward carefully, turning around and angling his bound hands towards them. He reaches out, allowing his fingers to wrap around one of the bars, holding his breath as his skin comes in contact with the cool metal. 

Nothing happens. 

He exhales, relieved, and is about to move away when a sudden pain lances through his fingers with a low hiss, a sizzling burning pain that makes him pull his hand back with a cry. He looks over his shoulder and down at his fingers, which are blistered and burned, raw and red. Even as he watches, disbelief and horror exploding in his chest, the wounds begin to heal over instantly, new skin crawling over the burns until they fade entirely. There isn’t even a scar or a blemish left on his hand where the silver had seared him. 

He looks up again, heart racing, hardly daring to believe what had just happened. _That’s impossible,_ he thinks. _Impossible._ He stumbles backward, his back hitting the wall and sliding down until he’s pressed against it, panic and shock and fear overwhelming him. The itch he had felt crawling beneath his skin is stronger now, making his body ache and his head spin. His throat closes up, his eyes stinging. He doesn’t think he’s ever felt more alone in his life than he does in this one moment; further away from home he’s ever been, on an unfamiliar ship—the ship of a man he was supposed to kill—and sitting crouched in this cell that seems built to repel him, to cause him pain.

“Help me,” he whispers, but even he can hardly hear himself, the pain and discomfort growing with every passing second. He lets his head fall back against the wall and closes his eyes, and when he finally does slip into a fitful, uneasy slumber hours later, he isn’t sure if he’d succumbed to the pain or if he’d actually fallen asleep. 

When dawn breaks and the sun rises at last, its light doesn’t reach his cell, nor is Adrian awake to realize it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me: i hate cliches
> 
> also me: so one character puts the edge of their sword under the other's chin to tilt their face up while they're chained up at their feet to taunt them during an interrogation
> 
> me again, but sobbing: ohmygod so one character puts the edge of their sword under the other's chin to tilt their face up while they're chained up at their feet to taunt them during an interrogation


	4. Chapter 4

She watches the storm outside give way and begin to die, the wind lessening and the rain slowing and the sea calming. The clouds overhead break and scatter, slowly drifting apart until they part like curtains and reveal the sky that had been veiled behind them, the darkest of dark blues and scattered across with stars. The moon is but a curved slice of silver above her, a slender crescent smiling down from the starry heavens.

She’s perched on the wide windowsill in her room, knees drawn up to her chest and arms looped around them, her chin resting on her knees. The surface of the sea several yards below her window is tranquil almost, entirely still and gleaming black beneath the dark night sky. The ship cutting effortlessly through the still water creates wide ripples that fan out artfully from where the hull slices through the surface of the ocean, and it’s lonely almost, with nothing around them for miles and miles, not a speck of land. 

They could be, for all the world, a paper boat gliding atop a puddle on the ground, detached and other and just so _small_ , so insignificant. She feels strangely unmoored as she gazes out at the world outside, the sky melding into the sea and turning into one long smear of night and day, of dark and light. She can’t quite decide whether it is the sea or the sky that it makes look infinite, stretching on for forever. 

The room Trevor has given her is small but comfortable, and it’s admittedly much more luxurious than the caravans her tribe had used on land and the small boats they’d used at sea. It’s decorated, much like the rest of the ship, in cheerful shades of red and gold, and to accommodate the curve of the side of the ship it’s slightly oval-shaped, the furniture’s inner edges curved in turn to fit to the walls. It merely accentuates the coziness of the little room, and she has to admit she’s pleased with the arrangement. If they’re going to be criminals and escapees of the law, may as well do it in style and comfort. 

She slides off the windowsill just as the first streaks of dawn begin to stain the sky, finally distinguishing the sea and the sky in a slender strip of palest orange. She moves across the room, her new boots soundless on the paneled and carpeted floor, and slips out the door, shutting it softly behind her.

Her feet move with a sort of trancelike purpose, automatically carrying her towards the captain’s quarters at the front of the ship. They come to a halt in front of the door and she’s already raised her arm and curled her fingers into a fist to knock when she hesitates, taking a step back. Her stomach has been twisting itself into knots ever since she’d boarded the ship, and there’s a perpetual swarm of butterflies that have taken up residence somewhere below her ribs, their delicate but insistent wings buffeting against her insides and turning her into a flustered, nervous wreck. 

She’s no stranger to this feeling, especially when Trevor is involved. But for some reason the confidence that had carried her here, so strong a moment ago, has faltered, and it’s left a sort of raging insecurity in its wake. The prospect of knocking, seeing the door open and seeing _Trevor_ open the door, probably in his sleep things with that fuzzy, warm aura of drowsiness clinging to his disheveled hair and his dusky lashes, seeing him look at her and expect something from her is suddenly impossible to fathom. 

She turns on her heel and all but flees from the place, weaving through the corridors at top speed. She turns out onto the deck, still slippery from all the rain, and ducks into the stairwell that leads down. She descends the stairs rapidly, hardly looking where she’s going. She flies past the sleeper deck, where she can still hear snores, and down further still, to the dim, long bunker that is the brig. 

It’s probably her least favorite room in any ship since they’re all built in the same place—all the way at the bottom. It’s dank, and perpetually damp and grimy and cold. The _Morning Star_ ’s brig is just as dark, but at least it’s not moldy and creaking with water, she thinks as she advances carefully, taking wide, careful steps to maintain her balance amidst the slightly uneven surface below. As smoothly as the ship is cutting through the water, there’s always tension and friction, and the closer to the hull you get, the more apparent it becomes. 

She knows where their enigmatic prisoner will be—if she knows Trevor at all, she knows that after the stunt he’d pulled yesterday he would take no chances nor indulge in any risks, and she knows he’d have been at his most careful. And a prisoner whose presence guarantees maximum security will only be in one place.

Surely enough the lone occupant of the brig’s numerous cells is crouched in the very last one, windowless and paneled with aspen and dry as a bone, with bars that gleam a bright, iridescent silver in the pale light of the dawn that leaks into the room from the other portholes set into the walls. His long body is folded rather awkwardly in on itself, his back pressed up against the wall and his head lolling on his shoulder, spilling dirty blond hair over his face, hiding it. If not for the slight rise and fall of his chest as he breathes, she would have thought he was dead already. 

She steps up to the bars, fingers reaching out to encircle one of the cool metallic cylinders. It’s so odd, that something that should be so ordinary and harmless to her would burn and hurt someone else, be so dangerous and painful. 

She doesn’t know why she’s here. 

She remembers talking to him last night, remembers his wild, cornered eyes and the already healed rope burns around his wrists, the clean hole in his shirt with nothing but whole skin behind it, skin that a bullet had punched through only hours before. And yet he’d been alive—nails cracked and clothes dirty and hair snarled, admittedly—but alive. She recalls how haughty he was, how arrogant even in the face of clear defeat, nowhere to go and nothing left to call his own but still sneering and cold and aloof. 

But behind his artifice of indifference she’d seen how afraid he was; how could he not be? He was on an enemy ship in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by people who meant him only ill intent, his men gone and his home so far behind that help was an impossibility. He’s well and truly trapped, and now crouched in this cell and caged like a wild animal she imagines he has even more reason to feel so. 

So why is she here?

She’d been drawn to him for some reason yesterday, had seen him creeping along the corridors under the liquid silver-blue light of the moon, the wounds on his wrists still raw and favoring his left shoulder. She had let him draw closer to freedom, had wanted him to leave for one split second, wanted to let him go, let him escape in blissful ignorance of who he was, _what_ he was. But he’d known too much, and he would die if he let the storm swallow him, no matter how powerful he was. Nothing is as strong as the ire of the sea. 

So she’d stopped him. He’d recognized her, though he hadn’t seen past her disguise. And then he’d challenged Trevor. Men, she thinks, somewhere between amusement and irritation. They can’t walk away from a wager, from a challenge, a chance to prove their strength, their worth. Annoyingly predictable. 

Dawn is not far away but she’s still early, still hovering here and gazing at the crumpled figure in the cell. She sees his chest hitch ever so slightly and takes a step forward, her heartbeat taking flight, jolting to life in her chest. The end of her boot strikes one of the silver bars and the sound echoes in the room, oddly loud even amidst the gentle splash of the sea below. She curses her own clumsiness inwardly as she sees the figure in the cell move, his head lifting up off his shoulder, his hair swaying in mesmerizing waves of dull gold. 

He turns towards her, legs still drawn up to his chest, face streaked with blood and grime. He doesn’t move, simply staring at her. She stares back without the slightest idea what to say. 

“Is it time?” he asks, and his voice is cracked and hoarse. “Is it dawn yet?”

She finds her voice. “It is. But it’s still early.” 

There’s something almost frightening about being on the other end of his cold golden gaze, something about his eyes that seems to root her to the spot, rendering her unable to move even if she tried. He still doesn’t make a move to stand, looking out at her expressionlessly. “Why are you here?” he asks. 

“I don’t know,” she says honestly. 

“The Captain doesn’t know you’re here?”

“No.”

“Who are you?” He lifts his face to meet her gaze, his eyes narrowed. She leaves her expression as honest and open as possible, wiping her face blank of emotion. “I’m just the First Mate,” she says, making sure to pitch her voice as low as she can. It makes her sound soft and shy, but like a soft and shy boy. “I’m no one.”

“You’re quite young to be a First Mate, aren’t you?” he says, still sprawled in the corner of the cell. Before she can even open her mouth to answer he goes on. “And how did you knock me out last night? I didn’t see you holding anything when you struck me.”

She smiled, but it was devoid of any humor. “I have my secrets just as you have yours, Captain Țepeș,” she says, bowing her head ever so slightly, and he stiffens almost as soon as the words leave her mouth, his lips thinning into a tight, defensive line. “I’m no Captain,” he says, his voice low. “Not anymore. _Yours_ made sure of that.”

“He cannot take away your standing,” Sypha says, taking a step forward to keep him in view. “Only the things that constituted it. That does not take away your title and your duties.”

“A shipless, crewless Captain.” He scoffs derisively, looking away from her. “There can be no higher disgrace. A captain who cannot keep his ship and his crew should not be called so at all.”

He turns to look at her again after a few minutes of tense silence, his expression softening into something almost like curiosity. “Why is there no window in this cell?” he asks finally. 

She blinks at him, thrown for a moment. “What?”

“This cell,” he says, glancing up at the bare stretch of wall where, set into the wood should be a porthole as it is for every other cell in the brig. “Why is there no porthole here? I couldn’t see the sunrise, nor does the light reach this corner.”

She reaches out and runs a finger along one of the bars, gazing at her own distorted, stretched and curved face reflected in its gleaming surface. “Well,” she says, choosing her words carefully, “let’s just say that if you win against Trevor today, you’ll find out.”

He sighs. “Another abnormality. Another question. Another lack of an answer. Is everybody on this fucking ship aware of my own secrets except me?”

Sypha only shrugs, then sits down by the bars, folding her legs underneath her so that she can feel the faint thrum of the ocean beneath her thighs and calves, feel the dormant power of it. She’s always been both fascinated and terrified of the sea, the latter ever since she’d fallen off a boat as a child and had looked down, where below her feet lay a ghostly dead reef, black and green and lifeless. She’d looked around, wildly, and had seen only endless blue, stretching sideways and downward for miles until it faded to the black of the unknown. Down there she knew there were billions of slimy slippery toothy things that never saw the light of day, down far, far below her thrashing little feet. The sheer thought of it, of how much water and how much _nothing_ was beneath her and all around her, had petrified her. She had screamed and gasped and paddled, her limbs desperately keeping her afloat lest she go unmoored and sink into that bottomless abyss, until her grandfather had pulled her, choking and spluttering, back onto the boat. 

She’s feared the sea ever since—not for the creatures that curl in its depths, but rather for the idea of it, how little is known about it and its depth, how far down it goes. Yet it fascinates her as all things fascinate her, its tides and currents and unpredictable spells of calm and rage. Perhaps that is why sailors speak of the sea as if she is a woman, for only a woman can be both a benevolent giver of life and ruthless taker of it. Only a woman feels with such intensity, shows herself in both dazzling beauty and tranquility and in fierce and terrible anger. 

“What are you thinking about?”

She’s broken rather abruptly from her reverie at the sound of their prisoner’s voice, cutting through the haze of thoughts in her mind. She glances up from where she’d been tracing an absentminded pattern on the floorboards beneath her fingers and looks at him. “What?”

“You suddenly looked as if you were very far away.” He blinks enigmatic golden eyes at her—such an unusual color, a bright, iridescent sort of gold—and she pulls herself back to the present. “Nothing,” she says. “Just… thinking about when I fell in when I was a child.” She raps the floorboards lightly with her knuckles, tucking a wayward curl of strawberry-blonde behind her ear. “It still keeps me up sometimes.”

“How old were you?”

She casts her mind back, shaking her head. “I must have been… five years old when it happened.”

“That _is_ young.” He gazes at her with a sort of renewed interest, brows furrowing slightly. “When I was that age I wasn’t even allowed on a boat. I wasn’t allowed in a lot of places as a child, the church included. I’m still not allowed in there, though I learned not to ask why. I’d sneak away on boats sometimes anyway though, and hide myself in the fishermen’s nets so I wouldn’t be seen.”

She feels her lips tilt up almost against her will, ignoring the way her heart jolted at his mention of not being allowed into the church. “The fishermen’s nets?” she asks instead. 

“I’d come back all filthy and smelling terribly of fish,” he says, a wistful sort of look in his eye. “There was once when I got into an empty barrel, and nobody knew I was there; what I didn’t know was there were several netfuls of fresh catches ready to be brought in.”

“Oh, no,” says Sypha, beginning to smile, and he nods at her, amused. “Oh, yes. I got so buried in fish, I could scarcely breathe. That taught me not to go sneaking in places I shouldn’t be.”

She laughs, trying and failing to imagine the man in front of her as a little boy, gap-toothed and slippery-fingered, shrieking as he gets covered in dead fish. It only makes it more difficult to stop, and soon she’s breathless and flushed with tears in her eyes from laughter.

He’s looking at her, a sort of oddly wondrous expression on his face. Then, slowly, he cracks a small smile—the first smile of his she’s ever seen, she realizes with a jolt. Soon his little smile grows into a grin, whish grows into laughter of his own, mingling with hers in the musty air. His whole face seems to transform, the corners of his eyes crinkling and the sharp lines of his face softening. He looks years younger, and even through all the dirt and grime and blood she’s struck suddenly by his unearthly beauty, how there must be flawless porcelain skin beneath all the crusted filth and dried blood gathered there, how if not for the tangles in his hair it must be fine as corn silk, and just as soft. 

She pulls herself from the flustered thoughts, suddenly feeling herself being yanked back down to earth. He’s a prisoner, an enemy, a lackey of the Church. She should be wary of him, shouldn’t even be talking to him. But there’s something about him that draws her to him, something dangerous and something entirely too intriguing to dissuade her. Unbidden in her mind rises the thought of Trevor, of what he’d think, of what he’d say if he saw her. 

_Ten years and he hasn’t even looked at you,_ whispers a bitter voice in her mind. _Ten years of loving him and all he’s done is duck into alleys with other girls, prettier and curvier girls whose sensibilities are as loose as their corsets. You have every right to move on, to look at other men and allow yourself to like it._

She bites her lip, glancing hastily away from him and up towards one of the portholes lining the walls of the other cells. The sun has begun to rise in earnest and there’s a thick bar of rose-gold sunlight slanting through it, spilling a perfect circle of warmth down onto the polished wooden floor. She can see dust motes dancing inside it, suspended in the air as if time has stopped in only that one bar of sunlight, as if nothing else matters. 

She stands up abruptly, brushing the dust off her knees. “It’s nearly time,” she says, and out of the corner of her eye she sees the smile slip off his face. “We should go.”

She fumbles for the keys in her pockets, finding the heaviest one, cast in the shape of a cross. She fits it to the lock, which springs open with a sonorous clang. Their prisoner stands slowly, all elbows and knees and disheveled hair. His expression is carefully neutral once more, as if even he knows as she does that their brief shared moment of vulnerability has passed as suddenly as they’d found it thrust upon them.

She opens the door and he steps out carefully to avoid coming in contact with the bars, giving an almost involuntary shiver of relief as he leaves behind the wood and metal that had probably caused him so much pain in the night, its weight lifting off his skin. She doesn’t look at him as she locks the door once more and sets off towards the steps, steadfastly looking ahead. 

And if she hadn’t so astutely been avoiding his eye, she would have noticed that his own gaze is just as deliberately leveled away from hers as hers is from his.

* * *

The storm has taken every last cloud in the sky with it, leaving the dawn as brilliant and crisp as the edge of a blade. The horizon is stained gold, dyeing the sea below it a ruddy orange. The wind is cold and brisk, and carries with it the faint scent of salt and seawater. 

Trevor is perched on the ship’s prow, in his usual spot in a small nook on the figurehead. He supposes it’s a little pretentious and more than a little blasphemous to have a massive carving of Lucifer falling from heaven wrapped in chains on the front of his ship, but one of the first things he ever remembered wondering about his family was why their most coveted weapon was named after the devil. Plus, it helped fuel the rumors on Dranova _and_ piss off the Church at the same time—so what’s not to like?

Moreover, he’s grown fond of it. Even if it’s sort of terrifying, what with Lucifer’s beautiful face twisted with agony and betrayal, bloody tears running down his cheeks and two sawed-off stumps on his back, still bleeding from where his wings had once been, torn off by his father before He cast him out of heaven. His broken body is lashed to the front of the ship, the chains around his ankles, wrists and neck, as well as the ones crossing over each other on his chest melding neatly with the prow and the rest of the front of the ship. 

There’s a small shelf of sorts near the figure’s back, where one of Lucifer’s torn-off wings meets his shoulder blade, that just happens to be perfect for sitting on and watching the sea go by below, and also happens to hide whoever sits there from the rest of the ship. He escapes here more often than he’d like to admit, away from the noise and general bustle of the ship and out here, where he can see the ocean stretching out for forever, turning into the horizon and turning infinite. 

“Trevor?”

He turns, a hand reaching out and gripping one of Lucifer’s wing stumps for balance as he stands. He peers over the figurehead’s shoulder and at Sypha, who’s standing near the helm with her arms crossed and her eyebrows raised, with a scowling and glaring Adrian Țepeș beside her, wrists bound together in thick iron manacles and looking positively murderous. It’s time, then. 

He gets a good foothold on the shelf, then pushes up and over its shoulder, levering himself easily with an arm on a wooden stump. He lands lightly on the other side, walking down the sloping slender wooden beam that attaches to the helm as casually as if he were walking on a broad gangway rather than a four-inch wide plank of wood. He drops neatly in front of them at the helm, and catches Sypha rolling her eyes in his direction, as well as her mutter of something that sounds a lot like _“show-off”_. He studiously ignores her. 

Adrian glares at him, and he glares right back. Hating this guy is a given, and it’s almost too easy—he works for the Church, and what with his last name and his undeniable heritage, he’s practically Trevor’s sworn enemy on general principle. And to add insult to injury, he’s a pompous, arrogant brat. Fighting—and winning—is going to be especially satisfying. 

He holds out a hand without taking his eyes off Țepeș. “Keys.”

There’s a soft jingle of metal as Sypha presses the heavy iron key to the chains into his palm. 

He still doesn’t break eye contact. “Go.”

She turns on her heel and leaves, vanishing from sight as she descends the stairs from the helm. Now it’s just the two of them, the sun rising steadily behind Trevor in a burst of dazzling gold that begins slowly creeping up the figurehead. Soon it’ll cover the whole ship and bathe it all in light. But he doesn’t intend for this to last that long. Adrian Țepeș will be back in his cell before the sunlight can reach the helm. 

“What did you put in that cell?” Adrian asks, golden eyes narrowed suspiciously after a few seconds of silent mutual glaring. “And what had you coated the bars with?”

“Why? They burn your delicate skin, Țepeș?”

A muscle in his cheek jumps. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on, or are you going to wait till after I’ve beat you to touch on the finer points?”

Trevor laughs. “We’ll see about that. The winning bit, I mean. As for knowing what’s going on—smart boy like you, shouldn’t you have guessed by now? Or are you too scared of the answer, even if you already have guessed it?”

Adrian says nothing, but that muscle in his cheek jumps again. 

Trevor takes a step towards him, finally looking away as he glances down, fitting the key to the heavy padlock on his manacles. Adrian holds himself still as Trevor undoes the chains, and the moment they come loose he lets them fall between them onto the deck. Then he kicks them away to the side, raising his face to turn the full force of his golden glare upon Trevor afresh. “Will you let me fight with my weapons, or were you intending to win this by leaving me unarmed?”

“Oh, I’m intending to win this fair and square, Church boy.” He reaches behind his back for the blade he’s kept sheathed there for safekeeping, not deeming his cabin secure enough to keep a clearly expensive sword. It’s massive, the hilt protruding over the curve of his left shoulder like a silver cross. Adrian’s eyes flash dangerously as Trevor holds the blade out to him hilt-first, but he says nothing as he reaches out and takes it. 

“Don’t worry, I have no intention of using a sword the Church probably forged for you,” Trevor says, patting his whip, which is coiled on his belt. “I have my own weapons.”

“The Church didn’t forge this,” says Adrian, fingers wrapping firmly around the handle as he lifts it to his eye. “I inherited it from my father.” He lowers the blade, his gaze following the blade and latching onto Trevor with a thinly veiled contempt making them glitter maliciously, almost like a challenge. As if he expects Trevor to rise to the bait—which he doesn’t, mostly because he has no idea what he’s talking about.

“I’ve never even met your father,” Trevor says, drawing his whip. It slumps to the deck below in a mass of black leather coils, like a limp snake. “But believe me, if I had met him, he’d be dead.”

Adrian’s lips curl back in a snarl, and Trevor’s eyes linger on the points of his teeth. “He _is_ dead,” he hisses. “And you would know all about that, wouldn’t you?”

Trevor stills for a moment, feeling that now-familiar confusion tug at him. His concentration slips for just half a moment, his whip dropping by a fraction of an inch—but Adrian catches it anyway, and a heartbeat later he charges, directly at Trevor. He takes a leaping step backwards, casting out his whip as he does, the heavy coils straightening and tautening, parrying Adrian’s slash in his direction. The edge of the blade skids across the length of the leather, dragging along it with a low hiss of metal. 

He spins, then lashes out again, the whip curving in on itself and striking Adrian directly in the chest. He hears a low gasp, then the bright ring of his blade as it comes whistling towards him. He ducks, then spins backwards, slamming his back against Adrian’s chest and ramming his elbow into his throat for good measure. Before he can retaliate Trevor dances out of reach, cracking his whip as he retreats. 

Adrian doesn’t even falter, snarling as he advances again, knuckles white on the hilt of his blade. His eyes flick leftwards for a split second, and Trevor turns towards the movement just before he lunges—to Trevor’s right. Caught off guard by the feint, Trevor just manages to twist away from the edge of the blade, but not quite fast enough. He feels the fabric at his side tear, the blade slicing cleanly through his shirt. It just barely grazes his skin, a cold kiss. 

But it doesn’t draw blood, and that’s what matters—

He freezes, the thought hitting him so suddenly it’s like a lightning bolt spearing into his head. Drawing blood doesn’t matter—or does it? 

He lets the idea sow itself into his head, lets it grow slowly as they trade blows, seemingly equally matched. He doesn’t know which one of them has the advantage; rationally, it would be Adrian, but since his own advantage is lost on him and he doesn’t know it’s there at all, the scales have tipped. And if Trevor manages to do what he’s planning to do, then they’ll tip in his favor. He can use Adrian’s own advantage against him, and even if it’s not the fairest of moves, it’ll work. 

Adrian sidesteps nimbly as Trevor lunges again, and he sweeps his blade out, catching him by the fingers. Determined not to bleed just yet, Trevor turns his wrist and allows his grip to falter, the whip slipping from his limp hand, opting to lose the weapon rather than let the sword cut him. He darts to the side, then draws his own blade, raising it and charging. 

He catches Trevor’s short sword by the hilt, and the blades meet with a loud, ringing clash, sparks flying where the metals chafe against each other. Trevor feels his biceps strain as they both push to get the upper hand, their eyes meeting over their joined swords. Is it just his imagination, or is there trace of scarlet where gold should be—?

Adrian sweeps his blade down and away from where it had been locked with Trevor’s, aiming to slash at his ribs. Trevor jumps back, knocking the tip away with his own blade. He raises his sword up in front of him just as the flat of Adrian’s blade collides with it with a clang, the sound ringing in his ears. He parries a thrust, then slashes. It’s blocked by a silver hilt and a glaring Adrian, whose face is entirely closed and unyielding, his face remarkably clear of sweat as he moves with an unerring speed. 

The next few minutes are a blur of slashing and thrusting and parrying, being blocked by Adrian’s blade and twisting away from his blows. His arms are sore, muscles burning and screaming from exhaustion and overexertion. Still he plows on, seeking the right opening, the precise moment to let his defense slip just the barest fraction—

He turns inward, Adrian’s blade whistling towards him. And instead of blocking it with his blade he allows his aching arms to give in to their pain and drop, the point of his sword dipping down as he raises his unguarded forearm to catch the edge of the sword. It drags across his exposed skin, opening up a wide gash in his skin, one that immediately wells up with bright ruby-red blood. It spills over his arm, and just before it can drip onto the deck at their feet, Trevor allows Adrian’s momentum to carry him forward, and all he has to do is take a single step towards him and press his bloody forearm directly into Adrian’s face.

Adrian recoils as Trevor’s blood smears across his mouth—and then he goes rigid. Trevor yanks his arm back, but the damage is done; his eyes snap towards Trevor, and his breath cuts off sharply in his throat when he sees—actually _sees_ —his pupils expand rapidly, so rapidly that between one heartbeat and the next they’ve turned almost entirely from gold to black. And a second later they flash into bright, bloody crimson. 

Adrian drops his sword, and it hits the deck with a clatter. He inhales sharply, and then pain suffuses his face as he cries out, and Trevor sees his canines sharpening, then elongating, curved and slender and deadly fangs that slice into his own lower lip, drawing blood that’s far, far brighter than any human’s. It must have hurt, because Adrian’s face is twisted with agony, his eyes still glowing an eerie, unfamiliar red. His face is drained of all color, leaving him chalk-white. Everything human about him has vanished, all replaced by alien features he probably didn’t even know were lurking just out of sight, behind a façade he didn’t even know he was wearing. 

And it’s Trevor’s blood that did the trick. 

Red eyes latch onto the gash on Trevor’s forearm, and Trevor’s heart skips a beat. He only has time to think something along the lines of _Oh, shit_ before Adrian lunges, his blade lying forgotten on the deck beside them. Trevor jumps back, holding his bloody arm out of Adrian’s reach. He supposes he should have anticipated this, but in his defense, he hadn’t thought this far ahead.

“Oh no, you don’t.” He aims a swift kick between Adrian’s ribs and he crumples with a low moan, eyes still shining like bloody rings in his face. He lashes out with a foot, kicking Trevor’s legs out from under him. Trevor loses balance, the wind knocked out of him as he falls in a heap beside the dhampir. 

He scrambles back as Adrian bears down on him; the full force of his strength is finally released from its hidden reservoir, and he clearly doesn’t know how to use it just yet. His fangs are at least two inches long and deadly sharp, sharp enough to tear his skin open and slice through his bones. There’s no recognition in those crimson eyes, only hunger. _Shit,_ Trevor thinks, still desperately scrambling backwards on his hands and knees. _What have I done?_

Just as Adrian lunges in for the kill something yanks him back, pulling him away from Trevor. He clambers to his feet, holding his throbbing forearm gingerly, and sees Sypha behind Adrian, slender cords of what looks like fire lashing his arms and torso. Her arms are holding his to her with a vicelike grip, and as hard as he struggles, her magic is stronger. He’s snarling and thrashing like a wild animal, and it seems to be all Sypha can do to hold him back. 

Trevor moves warily towards them and Adrian snaps at him, desperation in every jerk of his body. “Just a taste,” he’s saying, eyes still clinging to Trevor’s wound with an alarming hunger in them. “Just a small taste—”

“In your dreams, vampire,” Trevor says, then scoops up Adrian’s blade from where it’s lying on the deck at his feet and slams the end of the hilt into his temple, knocking him out instantly. He crumples, his hair fanning out around his head artfully as he hits the ground, unconscious. 

“Trevor, why?” Sypha asks, and she looks disapproving, almost disappointed. She’s frowning at him, face flushed from exertion. “Why did you have to trick him like that?”

“He didn’t even know what he was, Sypha.” He nudges Adrian’s unconscious body with the tip of his boot. “He had no idea. It’s clear that this was the first time he fought an actual person. He’s never seen blood before, and even if he has, he’s never seen it this close. And as for the silver, he probably used gold coins back in Wallachia. I don’t think he was allowed to use the silver ones.”

“He said, earlier,” Sypha says, kneeling beside his prone form, “that he’s not allowed into the church back at home. He said he was never allowed inside, and he’d… learned to stop asking why.”

“The bishop knew, then. The slimy son of a bitch knew he was dealing with a dhampir—the dhampir son of the most powerful vampire in the world. He probably raised him to be a weapon, to use against the enemy when the time came. He groomed him to be the perfect lackey, brainwashed and convinced that the church can do no wrong. He’d have been invincible with him by their side, and the bishop knew it. He hid his nature from him all his life, getting him to retract his fangs when he was a baby and not letting him touch the silver coins and never letting him see human blood.”

“That’s terrible,” Sypha says softly. She’s speaking more and more softly now that she has to mimic a boy’s cadence, and it’s almost disconcerting; he’s known Sypha to speak her mind and not care about who hears it, and he’s used to her not staying quiet for anyone. “Not knowing who he is, not knowing what he can do, having your identity repressed like that all your life…”

“Yeah, let’s not start feeling sorry for Dracula’s little boy just yet,” Trevor says, kneeling and snatching the manacles from where they’d been lying and snapping them closed over Adrian’s wrists again. “He’s still loyal to the church.”

“Now, maybe… but when he wakes?” Sypha blinks wide blue eyes at him, kneeling on Adrian’s other side with her palms resting on her thighs. “Once he finds out what the bishop kept from him, his natural response will be to turn his back on them. They took away who he was in favor of using him. Nobody would take kindly to that.”

“When you’re that close to someone, when you grow up with their ideas and their ideas of good and evil drilled into your head, you make excuses for their behavior,” Trevor reminds her. “I’ve seen it, you’ve seen it. Men whose wives and daughters and sisters were burned at the stake by the church say it was the right thing to do, say they were saving them from a terrible fate. Sinners are the only ones left free to think for themselves.”

She shakes her head. “He’ll come around, Trevor. I’m sure of it.”

He turns to her, eyes narrowed. “You said he told you he wasn’t allowed in the church. When?”

She hesitates for the barest fraction of a moment. “Earlier, in the cells. When I went to bring him here.”

He eyes her carefully. “Did he like you?”

Her cheeks flush a deep scarlet. “I—I don’t know, Trevor, we barely spoke. He’s our prisoner, remember?”

He weighs the idea in his mind, mulling it over before he speaks. “He told you that much, it must mean that he trusts you enough to talk to you about things. I want you to try and get closer to him, try to get information off him. If he finds you sympathetic enough, he’ll talk. I think he will. Then we’ll know a little more about what we’re up against.”

The redness in her cheeks deepens. “I’m not going to manipulate him into telling me things, Trevor. I’d actually rather you strap him to a chair and torture him—at least that’s honest. He’s already been lied to his whole life, treated like something to use. I’m not going to do that to him again.”

Trevor pinches the bridge of his nose, sighing. “Fuck’s sake, Sypha. I’m not asking you to seduce him or something, I just want to get him to talk. A little bit. And you know he sure as hell isn’t going to talk to me. So it might as well be you. And who knows, you may end up actually liking him. He seems a decent enough bastard when he’s not being an arrogant prick.”

“But you do want me to fake an interest in his well-being to get closer to him,” she says stubbornly. 

He spreads his arms wide. “Yeah. Yeah, I want you to fake thinking he’s a poor unfortunate little boy who’s had his life taken away from him by that fucking madman bishop, then by mean Captain Belmont, and I want him to think you’re sympathetic and nice, and I want him to be able to confide in you. Okay? Can you do that?”

She sighs, clearly frustrated. “Do I have a choice, Trevor?”

He turns away, a sour taste in his mouth. “No, you don’t.”

“Fine,” she says bitterly, standing up. “Fine, Trevor, I’ll do it. But if anything bad happens because of it, I am not responsible for what befalls either of us as a result.”

She stalks past him and towards the stairs, and as she passes him he grabs her arm, stopping her. “Just—try not to lower _your_ guard around him too much, okay? He’s dangerous, and I don’t want him to—”

_To fall in love with you, because that’s my job. To pine after you and never have you even if I’ve loved you for what feels like a lifetime._

“To what?” she says angrily, glaring up at him. 

“To—to hurt you,” he finishes, rather lamely. She scoffs derisively, saying nothing, then wrenches her arm out of his grip and storms away down the steps and out of sight. He watches her go just like he’s watched her go a thousand times before, his throat closing up.

His eyes fall to Adrian Țepeș’ unconscious form at his feet and sighs, kneeling and pulling him up, slinging one of his limp arms over Trevor’s shoulder to hoist him up. A close look into his face tells him his fangs have retracted, leaving behind just slightly-longer-than-average canines. Nobody would look at them twice.

He turns towards the sunrise just as its rays reach the ship, washing over him in a wave of buttery warmth. Sunrises are always best out at sea in his opinion, where it’s as if it’s rising right in front of you, with nothing between the sun and the ship to hinder its light. He glances beside him where he’s holding Adrian up, and the rays make him drip with golden light, making his hair shimmer as if it’s made of strands of the sun’s rays itself. It seems so odd, that he has all the qualities of a vampire but he can stand in the sun, can let its light cover him and remain unharmed. 

He closes his eyes a moment, tilting his face up to the light and the warmth, savoring it. He knows the next few weeks are going to be difficult to say the least, what with Sypha clearly disgusted with him and Adrian probably hating him, with a crew he hardly knows, sailing to God-knows where. And after that… after that he has no idea what’s going to happen. All he knows is that he’s entangled himself into something that’s far bigger than just him and the Church. Now that Adrian Țepeș is his prisoner, now that he knows what he is, Trevor has risked attracting the wrath of people much more powerful than the Church. And far more dangerous.

And even though he does it so rarely it probably doesn’t count, even though he doesn’t believe anything will come out of it he sends a tiny little prayer flitting up to the sky, even if God doesn’t give two shits about anyone, least of all an excommunicated pirate with very little to no moral fiber and even less honor. 

_Just let me survive this. That’s all. I just want to walk out of all of this, preferably with all my limbs still intact and with Sypha safe. That’s all I fucking ask._

He sighs, turns away from the sunrise, and then with Adrian Țepeș’ limp body still supported by his own, he begins to make his way back down to the cells once more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> did i make sypha have thalassophobia and project my bad experiences onto her because i have an internalized phobia of the sea? yes. Did i make trevor's ship's figurehead so sick that i now want his ship for myself? also yes. quit judging.
> 
> also adrian getting knocked out is starting to become a theme. he keeps getting knocked out. it's just so convenient lmao.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the next update will be here anytime between next week and five months from now, so get cozy yall. :)
> 
> cw: blood, injury, some graphic descriptions.

The gash across his arm opens up and starts bleeding again when Trevor is stripping off his clothes, now stiff with dried blood like stains of rust-colored flowers blossoming across the fabric. His sleeve has grown sodden and scarlet with fresh blood before he realizes, and he has to peel the torn flaps of what remains of the garment off his arm, the cut stinging in earnest now. He winces, dropping the bloody shirt at his feet as he examines the slice in his skin. It’s clean, a neat swipe that’s parted his skin easily. 

Stitches, then. 

He sighs wearily, stomping over to the bathroom to run water over the wound to clean it before doing what has to be done. He hates doing his own stitches; they come out jagged and uneven on his better days, and since the cut is on his left arm he’ll have to use his right hand, which he isn’t as dexterous with. Usually he would ask Sypha, whose hands are steadier and more experienced than his own, but right now she probably doesn’t even want to look at him. Asking her to stitch him up isn’t exactly the best way to apologize for being an insensitive bastard. 

He manages to thread a needle with numb fingers—he’s losing blood, and fast, making the fingers of his left hand clumsy and stiff—and tie it tightly, making a fist as he sits at his desk, elbows braced on the wood. He poises the edge of the needle at the edge of the wound and braces himself, counting briefly to three in his head before driving the tip into the first torn bit of his skin. 

He grits his teeth hard to stop himself from making any sort of noise, clenching his fingers tighter and ignoring the pain as he forces the needle through the other end of the cut, pulling the thread across and between the edges of his skin. Fresh blood wells up in the cut and spills down his arm, dripping steadily onto the floor. He pays it no heed, pulling the thread taut and moving on to the next stitch. It’s messy work, and within seconds his fingers are wet with blood and the needle and thread are covered in the stuff, shining a dark red. 

He’s halfway up the cut when he hears a knock at the door. 

Cursing under his breath, he stands, still holding the needle with his right hand as he stumbles across the room, his bare feet nearly slipping on the blood that’s gathered on the wooden floor. He shoulders the door open, his whole arm stiff with pain and the tips of his fingers aching from the several dozen times he’d pricked himself with the needle. “What?” he snaps, then stops short when he sees Sypha on the other side of the door, her face steadfastly expressionless. “Oh,” is all he manages to get out. “What is it? Is something wrong?”

“The crew needs a heading,” she says shortly. “Do we keep heading west?”

“Yeah. Yeah, keep going towards the Mediterranean,” he says, glancing down, briefly distracted by the unpleasantly warm and tickling sensation of having fresh blood running down his arm from the half-closed wound. “Once we hit it I’ll let you know when to change course—shit.” 

The blood has successfully traveled down the length of his arm and is now dripping ceaselessly off his fingers onto the floor between his bare feet and Sypha’s boots, gleaming like spilled wine. “Sorry about that,” he mutters, swinging his bloody arm out of sight as Sypha’s eyes fall on the wound. They widen immediately. “I’ll just—”

“Trevor, you _know_ you’re terrible at stitching yourself up—what have you done?” She grabs his arm before he can shut the door and he winces, deciding it’s probably wisest to stay quiet. She glances up, brows furrowed with concern. “Let me,” she says.

He only nods. 

She sits him down on his bed, prizing the needle from his numb fingers and kneeling beside him. He’s light-headed and dizzy from blood loss as she lowers her head over the wound and undoes the clumsy, unevenly spaced stitches he’d threaded through the cut and carefully does them all again. It doesn’t hurt as much, but that’s probably because he’s seconds away from passing out. And because it’s Sypha, Sypha with her careful hands and nimble fingers, Sypha sitting so close he can smell the faint, sweet scent that usually shrouds her and feel the warmth of her breath on his skin and see the coppery downward brushstrokes of her lashes, feathering over the tops of her faintly freckled cheeks as she looks down, entirely focused. 

She finishes the last of the stitches with a faint tug and ties it off neatly, setting the needle aside as she examines her work. The rows of thread are neat and orderly, evenly spaced and close together, holding the wound closed. His skin is sticky with drying blood, and already the wound is beginning to itch. There’s blood in various stages of drying everywhere, crusted underneath his fingernails, all over the floor by the desk and covering his hands and Sypha’s fingers. Seeing so much of his own blood everywhere is disconcerting, and the room is beginning to swim in front of his eyes.

“Wait here,” Sypha says softly. “I’ll go get some bandages.”

He thinks he nods, and she stands and leaves. He blinks, and his eyelids feel heavy and stiff. He can’t even move his fingers, stuck together as they are with blood. He knows he did this to himself, that he’s the only one to blame for all this. He’d baited Adrian Țepeș into exposing his own nature, and he’d paid the price—not just the wound, but so many other things. Sypha’s trust, for one thing. Exposure, for another. He’d just drawn an even bigger target on his own back and the back of everyone on this ship, the whole crew. Soon it won’t be just the church looking for them and hunting them down. And it’s all Trevor’s fault.

He feels something hot and damp drag across his stinging and throbbing forearm and jumps, realizing belatedly that Sypha has returned and is kneeling by his bed again, a tub of steaming water beside her and a sodden rag in her hand, gently cleaning the blood off his skin. He blinks down at her blearily, feeling oddly light-headed and detached from his own body, as if he’s watching himself from behind a pane of misty glass, only able to see a faint, blurry outline and hazy suggestions of reality. 

Sypha dabs at the stitched wound with something that stings and burns, and he doesn’t even have the strength to articulate the pain of it, a soft little moan escaping his lips instead. “Hurts,” he mutters. 

“This will help with the healing,” Sypha says, not looking at him. She hasn’t looked at him the whole time she’s been in here, tending to his arm. Even half-conscious he feels a little pang of something that’s part regret and part anger. Why does he have to fuck everything up? 

Sypha stands long enough to sit beside him on the bed, still wiping the blood off his skin. Somehow it’s made its way onto his face and chest, and it’s dried in sticky splotches of dark red. The smell of it is everywhere, the air thick with its heavy iron scent. He holds himself still as she dabs at his skin, suppressing a shiver or two as she leans forward, that sweet vanilla smell of her skin washing over him and filling his head. Her lips are slightly parted, and she’s so close he can see the dents her teeth have made in the soft skin where she’s bitten it. He can’t take his eyes off her, no matter how many times he tells himself to stop. Her face is as familiar to him as his own, but he can never get enough of looking at her, and every time he does he discovers something new about her face—the freckles dusting her nose, the slivers of darker blue in her eyes, the way the left corner of her lips goes up first when she smiles.

He doesn’t remember falling in love with Sypha, but he remembers realizing it. They’d been maybe sixteen or seventeen years old, sitting on the roof of one of the taller buildings in Dranova, swinging their legs over empty space and eating one of those expensive icing-covered tarts from the bakery in the market after Trevor had saved up enough coin to finally buy one. They’d broken it in half with their hands and shared it, licking their fingers and giggling. There had been icing and crumbs everywhere but the tart had been sweet and tasted of fresh green apples and cinnamon and it melted on his tongue, and with Sypha sitting squeezed beside him and the taste of it in his mouth he’d actually been happy, one of the first times he’d felt really happy since he’d been a child. 

A bit of icing had fallen onto Sypha’s robe and she was trying to rub it off steadfastly, chin tucked into her shoulder and tongue poking out just a bit, eyebrows scrunched together and all of her concentration leveled on that single task of getting the little icing stain off her clothes. There had been crumbs dusting her lips and her hair was in disarray, the evening sunlight slanting down onto her and coating her in dark gold. He was looking at her, just like he’s looking at her now, and then he’d realized suddenly that his life would quite simply be nothing without this girl in it. 

He’s jerked back to the present when Sypha withdraws, having sponged all the blood off him. She gently begins to wrap his forearm with a cloth bandage, and he can feel a cool salve smeared on the inside. Once the wound is covered and the bandage is tied off she draws away, examining her work. She exhales, and he can see the vulnerable line of her throat move as she swallows, then nods. “That should do it,” she says. “Make sure you don’t overexert yourself, otherwise the stitches will come undone.”

He says nothing and she sits back, her hands covered in his blood. Finally she glances up and meets his eye, and their gazes catch and hold. He sees hesitation tug at her face visibly, and then she glances away quickly. “You’ve still got blood on you,” she murmurs, and she leans down, wringing out the rag she’d used earlier into the bucket, still steaming gently. The water inside is more red than colorless now. 

She wipes the cloth carefully across his face, and she’s still not looking at him. He can feel exhaustion and blood loss dragging him under, making his limbs heavier and his vision dimmer. He looks at her as she looks away from him, busying herself cleaning the blood off his skin. He swallows, and when he speaks his voice is cracked and dry. 

“Sorry,” he says.

She glances up for the barest fraction of a second. “What?” she asks, and she sounds slightly uncertain.

“I’m sorry.”

She looks away again. “For what?”

“I don’t know—everything.” He sighs, shutting his eyes so he doesn’t have to see her avoiding his gaze. “I’ve been a shitty friend, especially in the past few days.”

“You’ve lost more blood than I’d thought,” she says, and now she sounds amused. “You have nothing to apologize for, Trevor. I know it’s been hard for you, what with everything that’s happened in the last week. You’ve been doing everything you can.”

“That’s still not enough.” He opens his eyes, and this time she’s looking directly back at him. “I haven’t been fair to you.”

“This is ridiculous,” she says, shaking her head and continuing to sponge the dried blood off him. “You don’t know what you’re saying, Trevor. This is your fatigue talking.”

“Then it’s best to wring a confession out of me now, since I don’t have the presence of mind to stop myself from saying it,” he says, and he reaches up, fingers encircling her wrist, stopping her. She inhales sharply, looking back up at him. Her fingers free the cloth and it slides to the floor, leaving a trail of bloody water in its wake. Neither of them pay it any mind, still staring at each other. 

“Saying what?” Her voice is barely above a whisper. 

“What I really think,” he says.

“About?”

“Everything.”

“Trevor…” She hesitates, and now she’s looking at him, really looking at him—not ducking her head and shying away like she was before. Being on the other end of the full force of her gaze is startling after she’d avoided his eye for so long, and her face is so familiar to him, more so even than his own. There’s a blazing sort of hesitation suffusing her features, a kind of insecurity, one that’s jarring; Sypha is many things—she is fierce and she is powerful and she is confident, and sometimes she’s obstinate and she can be a total pain in the arse—but she’s never insecure. She’s never uncertain. 

But she is now. 

He wants to answer that question he can see in her eyes. Because he can see it, hovering just out of reach of either of them, dancing in her periphery. It’s there, and he thinks he knows the answer to it. He hopes he does. He wants to tell her he loves her, wants to hope that that will fix everything magically somehow. But it will only put another burden on her shoulders, already hunched under the weight of so many others. So he swallows the words, just like he’s been swallowing them since he was sixteen. It will only ruin everything. 

He always ruins everything. 

And he can see her guard lowering, cautiously. His own is crumbling with every second, worn down as it is by pain and blood loss and Sypha’s proximity and the sound of her voice, the touch of her fingers. 

He knows he can’t let this happen. 

He’s fucked up—he’s shone a spotlight down onto this ship, another one. Now everyone in the Seven Seas will be gunning for them, everyone will be waiting to take their pound of flesh. Now Adrian Țepeș is his prisoner, and he knows what he is. He can’t allow anyone else to get hurt because of what he’s done. He can’t allow anyone close enough to share that spotlight, to widen that target. 

Especially not Sypha. And that means he has to whatever it takes to push her away. He’d rather Sypha hate him than die because of his carelessness. He steels himself, adjusting himself for another weight, another problem—and then he pulls back just barely. 

He sees her eyes shutter almost instantly the moment he does, sees the walls close up around her again. She sits up, her fingers falling away from his chest and her other hand deftly scooping the blood-soaked rag up again. She ducks her head, and just like that that brief little moment, that slender cord that had connected them for just a few second, breaks once more. 

“Thanks for…” He blinks down at his bandaged arm, feeling something hot and bitter growing in his throat. “You know. I’m rubbish at this stuff.”

She nods. “It’s nothing.”

He tries to swallow whatever it is that’s beginning to make it hard to breathe, leveling a blow and praying it lands, for her sake if not his own. “Lucky you decided to come by. I didn’t think you would—I thought you’d send someone else to ask about the heading.”

Her mouth tightens, and she stands, dropping the sodden rag into the bucket with a splash of bloody water. “I suppose,” is all she says, tightly. “It’s my job, isn’t it?”

He doesn’t know if she meant it to, but it stings. She begins to turn away, her shoulders tensing and her face closing up. She’s going to leave. She’s going to turn away, and she isn’t going to turn back around again. And it’s worth it. Anything to keep her safe. 

She’s about to turn away fully when he aims his final blow. “You thought about what I told you earlier, right? About… about him?”

She stiffens, then glances back his way. “What?”

“You’ve given it some thought?”

She hesitates. “Yes… yes, I have.”

“Good. So now you’ll know it’s necessary. And again—lucky you’re here, because I think you’ll be up to the task. Better you than me. And it’s like you said; it’s your job, isn’t it?”

The blow hits home: Sypha flinches visibly, hurt flashing across her face for a split second before she hardens again. Her posture is stiff and unfriendly when she spins on her heel and stalks from the room, slamming the door behind her as she goes. The moment it does he sags against the back of the bed, all the energy draining out of him. He curls in on himself, blinking hard to get rid of the stinging in his eyes, and puts his face in his hands.

* * *

In his dreams, he sees his mother.

He remembers her, remembers that she had hair like spun gold and eyes like chips of summer sky, that her arms had been the safest place in the world and her voice the most calming thing he had ever heard. Sometimes he hears it in the wind that curls off the sea, hears it in the crash of the waves and the whisper of the tides, feels her arms around him instead of the water, sees her eyes instead of the endless blue expanse of the ocean. Sometimes he wonders if he will feel the same comfort she made him feel if he lets himself drown. Wonders if it will bring him peace. Succumbing to the one entity he loved more than anything—but is that the sea or his mother?

His mother’s eyes blink out at him, warm and kind and blue. He sees her smile, and beckon him towards her, her arms outstretched. She calls his name, and he goes to her. 

His fingers pass through her skin like mist, and he falls forward into the choppy, storm-churned sea instead, realizing too little, too late that he had seen the waves, not her eyes, and heard the roar of the sea, not her voice, and now he feels the current drag him under and not her arms. But he doesn’t remember enough of her, doesn’t remember her as if she’s standing in front of him. He remembers her the way a half-remembered dream lingers in one’s mind, turning to liquid in your hands as you watch, dripping uselessly to the ground when you try to grip it tight, not wanting to let it go. He remembers her in impressions and suggestions, the sound of a lullaby and the feeling of silky golden hair, the softness of her cheek against his. 

Her memory fractures and breaks into shards, each one tipped with blood—

 _Blood_. 

He can taste it in the back of his throat, coppery and thick and sharpening his vision, elongating his teeth, making everything stand out in bright, brutal detail. It makes him as quick and as intangible as the wind, sucks his soul out of his teeth bit by bit, drop by drop. If he fills himself with enough of it he’ll turn into a soulless husk, a vessel made of hunger and instinct. 

He sees the Bishop, sees the disgust on his face as he beholds the creature that Adrian has turned into, the creature he has been all along. Sees the cross in his hands, a cross that will sear his flesh, burn it away and turn him into ash. He sees himself as a boy, unallowed to enter the church, asking the Bishop why. He remembers never getting answers, remembers giving up on seeking the truth. He thinks he knows why, now. 

He dreams of his father, which is impossible—he never knew his father. But does he? He sees blood on his hands even though the hands aren’t his own, tastes blood on his teeth, but they don’t belong to him. He sees a ship at midnight and a crew that doesn’t breathe, and wonders if he is losing his mind. 

He dreams about the sea, and he dreams of blood, and dreams of his parents. And in the whirlwind of memories and impressions and shards of bloody glass, he can’t tell which is which and who is who. He doesn’t think he even knows who he is anymore. Is he human, or is he a monster? Is he Adrian, or is he somebody else, somebody who has been lurking beneath his skin for his whole life? Is he his mother’s son, or his father’s? Or is he neither? 

He thinks about the First Mate, the boy with the ocean eyes. He thinks about his soft voice, his direct gaze, thinks about the strange feeling he gets whenever they speak, as if there’s something missing. And he thinks about Trevor Belmont, and he doesn’t know whether he hates him or is indebted to him for what he did. 

He thinks and he dreams, and he drifts. And outside, the sea laments its horribly beautiful symphony, and he isn’t sure, but he thinks he hears the wind calling his name.

* * *

The wound on his arm itches, and he hates it. 

Resilience and willpower are all well and good when it comes to enormously difficult things like being tortured for information and not giving in when that pretty young thief had attempted to seduce him in order to steal his dagger (he admittedly hadn’t shown much willpower in that last situation, but Trevor had managed to hoodwink him and steal the emerald ring right off his delicate little finger, _after_ allowing the boy to back him into a hidden alcove at that party). But those great qualities always seem to desert a person when faced with something as stupid as an itchy set of stitches. 

He curls his fingers into fists to avoid the urge to scratch, knowing that he’ll rip the stitches wide open and spill half his lifeblood down onto the prow. Not to mention it’ll hurt like mad, get infected and make him regret it the moment he does it. But maybe he deserves it. He still can’t get the look on Sypha’s face out of his head before she’d turned on her heel and slammed the door. God, he can’t even fathom how much of an arse he is. 

He sighs, leaning his head against the figurehead behind him. It doesn’t work trying to convince himself it’s worth it. Even if it is, it feels like shit. 

He looks down, where beneath his boots the ship slices through the churning waves. Their surfaces are turned to the darkest of blues by the evening sky, and the sunset is beginning to streak across the sky above him. It’s always beautiful out here in the middle of the ocean, where it’s just him and the blue sky and the blue sea. Peaceful, almost. Like he hasn’t got the church and a fuckton of pissed-off vampire generals on his tail. 

He mutters a few choice curses under his breath, swinging himself over the figurehead and back onto the helm. Practice keeps him from slipping and being cut in half by the speed and weight of the ship moving through the water, as does a dash of caution. He may not be afraid of much, but getting sliced in half by his own ship isn’t high on his bucket list. 

The ship is bustling with activity, even if it’s just seven men on board besides him, Sypha and Adrian Țepeș. He just nods at the men as he passes by, turning and ducking down the steps belowdecks. He doesn’t have it in him for small talk right now, even if it might be important small talk. Stopping on every third stair to make sure Sypha isn’t down here he slowly moves down, down and down further still until he steps out into the brig, the creak of wood and the sound of the waves loudest here. 

He stops in front of the last cell, and earlier he hadn’t known whether he felt bad for Adrian Țepeș or not. He’d thought about it a lot, about whether what he’d done had been morally right, or ethically wrong, or just plain stupid. And while he still doesn’t know the answer to the last one, now he knows for sure that he definitely doesn’t think he’s done the man any favors. 

Despite the silver bars and the aspen walls and the other anti-vampire paraphernalia that made up this cell Trevor had deemed it wise to restrain his arms, knowing that not much, not even silver, could stop a vampire if they were thirsty enough. And this particular vampire had technically been starving for about twenty-five years. Not a very optimistic number. So he’d shackled his wrists to the walls with iron, knowing it would both restrain him and restrict his blood flow, making it harder to move without it feeling like someone had just chopped both his arms off at the shoulders. 

He looks like some heathen’s version of Jesus, arms chained to either side of his body, half-slumped against the wall, wrists bleeding and healing and bleeding again, bruised and battered and the lower half of his face a mask of blood. His eyes are closed, the lids so dark they look like bruises on his face, which is more gaunt and hollowed than Trevor remembers. His hair is hanging around his face in lank golden strips, tumbling messily onto his shoulders. His chest barely rises and falls, the only sign that he’s even alive. All in all, he looks like hell, and it’s all Trevor’s fault. 

_What the fuck am I even doing here?_ he thinks suddenly, swallowing hard and taking a step backwards. It’s a mark of how disoriented he is that the swaying of the ship makes him stagger, and it takes a few seconds for him to find his footing. He’s beginning to turn away when he hears a weak voice behind him speak. 

“Leaving so soon?”

He freezes, still halfway through turning towards the door. _Ah, fuck._

He turns slowly back towards the cell, feeling oddly like a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Not that he knows how that would feel. 

Adrian Țepeș hasn’t moved a single inch, his hands still chained, wrists still bruised and skin broken and leaking blood and clear fluid, back curved awkwardly and slumped against the wall. Only now his eyes are open, no longer two dark circles but two dull golden disks that are filmed over with a heavy layer of fatigue and sleeplessness. He’d probably been awake the whole time. Bastard. 

“It’d be a bit creepy if I just hung around watching you sleep, wouldn’t it?” Trevor says, stepping up to the bars with his hands in his pockets. Adrian’s face twitches minutely as he shifts, pulling his knees up to his chest with apparent difficulty, as if he doesn’t want to show the pain he so obviously feels. Trevor ignores the sliver of guilt and pity that burrows between his ribs. 

“I suppose,” is all he says. “Only I wasn’t asleep.” He shakes his hair away from his face, which is alarmingly expressionless. This man’s whole life has been flipped upside down and set on fire, everything he believed in ripped apart and scattered to the winds. Surely he should be feeling _something_. He looks at Trevor with those tired, lifeless eyes of his. “What are you doing here?”

“I… don’t know,” Trevor says, honestly. 

“You’re the second person to say that to me,” Adrian says, leaning back against the wall. It looks incredibly uncomfortable, and Trevor knows that if he stands here for one more minute he’ll end up tossing him the keys that sit heavily in his pocket. “Am I the person you all come to when you’ve nowhere else to go, then?”

“Maybe. I’d take it as a good sign, if I were you. It means people don’t think you’re a prick.”

“I beg to differ.” He frowns out at Trevor. “Or rather, you would.”

“I don’t think you’re a prick, really,” Trevor says conversationally. “I’ve just been raised to.”

Adrian’s face stills, and finally there’s the barest sliver of emotion on his face—and it’s an amalgamation of panic and fear and frustration and anger and sadness, and how that one little millisecond of expression can convey all that is beyond him. It’s the realization that he really is truly upset by what he learned, that Trevor really fucked up _that_ badly, that makes him grab the keys with minutely shaking fingers and unlock the cell door. 

That earlier look of blankness along with a tinge of suspicion replaces his expression as Trevor opens the door with the squeak of hinges and fishes the other set of keys out of his pocket. “Fuck this,” he mutters, unlocking the chains around his wrists. Adrian doesn’t move as Trevor frees his hands, but the moment the last manacle comes loose he exhales, his fingers wrapping around his own wrists to soothe the bites, sitting fully on the ground against the wall with his legs crossed beneath him. His shoulders slump with the relief from the pain almost instantly. 

“I suppose these will look normal again in a few hours,” he says, examining the deep scores the iron had dug into his skin, braceleting his wrists with ribbons of scarlet. 

“I’d expect so.”

“Couldn’t stomach how pathetic I looked, I suppose?” He raises an eyebrow, and Trevor shrugs. “Something like that.”

Adrian looks down at his hands, then back up at Trevor. “I’m not going to thank you, Belmont.”

“I wasn’t expecting you to,” Trevor says, turning around again. He shuts the cell door behind him again, locking it with a loud click. By the time he turns to face the inside of the cell again Adrian is looking at his wrists blankly—where the wounds are healing even as they both watch, the torn skin knitting itself back together and new skin smoothing over the scar tissue. Within seconds, all that’s left is the blood that had gathered there earlier. 

“Not a few hours then, I suppose,” Adrian says after a pause, examining his own hands. “I still have to get used to this.”

“Not a bad thing to get used to, is it?” Trevor glances ruefully down at his own arm, where the skin around his stitches is still red and inflamed, sticky blood gathering between the threads. It still itches. “I mean, there are worse things that come with being half-vampire.”

“Like still being hungry no matter how much you eat and knowing you can’t satiate it with human food?” Adrian asks, and now there’s an edge to his voice. “Like feeding on the blood of the innocent? Like not being able to touch silver? Like staring eternity in the face and realizing you have nothing to live for even if you’ll outlive the whole world and possibly the very universe?”

“Look,” Trevor says, trying as hard as he can not to get irritated, “it isn’t my fault that—”

“That I am what I am? But it is your fault that you forced that realization on me when I was least expecting it,” Adrian snaps. “You knew exactly what you were doing, and you did it anyway. That’s on you, Belmont.”

“If you want to blame anyone,” Trevor says, “blame your Bishop. He knew what you were your whole life. I’ve known you a total of five days. Who’s to blame here?”

Adrian opens his mouth, then closes it again. “I don’t believe it,” he says, softly. “I don’t want to.”

“Well, it’s the truth, so you have to believe it no matter what,” Trevor says. “You’re a dhampir, Țepeș. Your dad is fucking _Dracula_. You’re arguably the most powerful being on this planet, second only to your father. You have to believe it, because now there are probably a bunch of very angry and betrayed vampire generals sailing towards us in order to get you.”

Adrian gapes at him. “What?”

“Your father isn’t dead,” Trevor explains, not-so patiently. “He’s an immortal and all-powerful vampire king. The father of all vampires, the first vampire, whatever you want to call it. My family has spent their whole lives hunting him, but he’s good at what he does, and what he does is skulk out of sight. And now that you know all this, very pissed off vampire generals are going to try and get you to get an edge over your father.”

“But—” He splutters, a look of genuine and honest surprise on his face. “I don’t—”

“Everything you’ve been told about your past and your family is a lie,” Trevor finishes. “So you understand why I’ve taken due precautions?”

“I—I suppose—but—” He takes a deep breath. “I’m not sure if anybody’s told you,” he says, glancing up at Trevor, “but you simply _ooze_ subtlety.”

“I never had cause to sugarcoat things, Țepeș, and I never will.” He points at him. “And I am not starting with you.”

“So you have met my father,” Adrian says, clearly undeterred. Trevor sighs. “No, I haven’t. If I had, either I’d be dead or he would be.”

Adrian says nothing for a long time, merely looking sown at his fully healed wrists with something almost like insecurity written all over his face. Finally, he speaks. “I… don’t really know what to say,” he says. 

“How about ‘thank you for opening my eyes, Trevor’?”

“Fuck you,” he says without missing a beat, and Trevor can’t help but laugh. Even Adrian cracks a smile, but it fades away a second later. “I don’t know what to think,” he says. “My whole life I was taught to hate people like me, taught to think I’m unholy and the product of a violent mistake. How can I just be expected to live with that and act like it doesn’t mean anything to me?”

“You can’t just carry on,” says Trevor, taking a few steps forward and sitting cross-legged by the bars. “I get that. But you do have to acknowledge that the Bishop all but violated your whole existence and used you as a means to an end, and that he lied to you knowing who you were. Sy—my first mate said you weren’t allowed into the church as a kid. I’m sure you dealt in gold and not silver. I don’t think you’ve ever seen real, actual combat where people bleed heavily. He took who you are away from you, and that can’t be forgiven.”

He sighs. “I know that,” he says. “But I can’t deny that without him I would most certainly be dead.”

“It’s ‘not being dead’ against ‘using your existence to protect himself’,” says Trevor, holding his hands up. “It’s a simple choice to me.”

“But not to me.” Adrian frowns. “I understand what he did was unforgivable, but… if he had a chance to explain himself—”

“No,” says Trevor. “No way. That’s playing right into his hands. It’s what he wants, for you to try and forgive him. He hates you. He thinks you’re a monster and a thing of the devil, a by-product of hell. He acted like he cared about you. He sent you to kill me thinking you’d manage it, and that gets rid of the only thing standing between the church and their perfect vision of a world that bows down to them and they subjugate. Going to him with the benefit of the doubt is exactly what he thinks you’ll do if you find out, which you have. You have to cut him out, or he’ll end up popping up when we all least expect it and fuck everything up way more than it already is.”

Adrian lets out a long breath. He stays silent for a few minutes, then says, “All that being said, it would have been much easier simply to come down here and tell me who I was instead of—”

“Fuck’s sake, okay, fine—I’m sorry,” Trevor says, throwing his hands up. “What I did was unfair and mean and kind of cruel, and I should have thought twice before springing it on you like that. Okay? Happy now?”

There’s something almost like a smile on Adrian’s face. “I suppose.”

“So about the Bishop…?”

“I have to think about it,” Adrian says stubbornly. “I can’t just let go of such a big part of my life just like that. I need some time to think.”

“Right,” Trevor says. “Now that that’s out of the way, come on.” He stands, dusting off his trousers before grabbing up the keys and unlocking the door. “Out you come.”

“What? Why?” He looks genuinely bewildered, and it only succeeds in making Trevor feel even guiltier. _Because I’ll feel like shit knowing you’re rotting away down here when I could put you somewhere you don’t aversely react to every inch of._ “Because it’s too much work coming all the way down to the brig to bring you food and shit, and I’m a lazy bastard. How’s that?”

“Weak, but I’ll take it.” He stands, warily eyeing Trevor as he steps out of the cell. Trevor rolls his eyes. “Plus, you reek and are in desperate need of a bath.”

“That’s a better case,” Adrian says, turning to face him. Trevor side-eyes him, raising a brow. “You’re not going to jump on me and eat me alive, are you?”

“Much as I’d enjoy that, no,” Adrian says, haughtily turning his nose up. _And he’s back._ “There’s nowhere to run, so that would be fruitless. It’d be satisfying, though.”

“I’m sure I taste delicious,” Trevor says, locking the now-empty cell and moving towards the door with Adrian trailing behind him, muttering something about bitter blood and Belmonts. He hides his grin. 

“Your arm is bleeding,” Adrian says helpfully as they climb the steps. Trevor glances down at the aforementioned arm, where one stitch has come loose. Blood is beading at the open tear, rapidly. He looks quickly at Adrian, who seems unfazed. Either he has iron self-control, or it doesn’t really affect him unless it’s at very close proximity. Either way, Trevor isn’t willing to risk it. He digs a scrap of cloth out of his pocket, wrapping it around the wound and ignoring the way it steadily begins to bleed through. “There,” he says. “All better.”

Adrian sighs. “I’m not going to turn feral at the sight of a cut, Belmont,” he says testily as Trevor leads him to the last empty room on the ship. He can’t believe he’s actually doing this. “Besides, it’s small. And I don’t need the stuff to survive,” Adrian goes on. “Moreover, I’m not a danger to any of you.”

“That,” mutters Trevor, “remains to be seen.”

* * *

There’s a certain vindictive satisfaction Sypha derives from ripping off her bindings every night when she goes to bed. 

They may be necessary, but they’re uncomfortable. She can actually _feel_ her body shifting to accommodate the tightness of them around her chest, compressing her ribs and giving her less space to breathe. 

She collapses onto the bed, feeling the softness of the mattress beneath her back. It feels like heaven after a day’s constant work, and even though she thinks she sleeps better on her bed in the caravan, this isn’t all that bad. She sighs as she closes her eyes, allowing all the tension of the day to drain from her body. 

It had taken longer than she’d anticipated to clean Trevor’s blood off her hands, watching the water run pinkish in the sink for what felt like hours and hours but was probably merely minutes. She still can’t shake off the unease and the anger at what he’d told her earlier, pricking her consciousness every few minutes and making her mood plummet. It had been uncharacteristic but almost predictable, as if she’d been expecting him to tell her what he’d told her. So why is she so disappointed?

 _Come on, Sypha,_ she tells herself. _You know better than to trust Trevor Belmont._

But she doesn’t know why there’s a little voice lingering in her head, telling her that something’s wrong. And usually, that voice is never wrong. 

She sits up, heart hammering. Quickly tying the bandages around her chest again and slipping on a coat, she turns the lamps low and leaves the room, shutting the door quietly behind her. She pads down the hall towards where the captain’s quarters are, making sure her footsteps are soundless on the paneled floors. Standing just outside the door she listens for a minute, but hears nothing. Casting one quick, cursory glance back at the firmly shut door she hurries towards the stairs, taking them down four at a time. Skidding into the brig, she moves forward cautiously until she reaches the last cell, unable to see anyone inside. She steps out directly in front of it, unable to believe her eyes.

The cell is empty. 

She doesn’t waste a moment, turning and racing back up the stairs and towards Trevor’s room. She’s just about to knock when it flies open, revealing a very dubious-looking Trevor with both eyebrows raised. “Let me guess,” he says before she can even open her mouth. “Our illustrious prisoner is missing.”

She gasps for breath, shaking her head. “How did you—”

“Because I’m the one who moved him.” He turns and walks back into his room, leaving Sypha to follow. “I suppose I felt a bit bad with him down there. That cell mustn’t’ve been a load of fun.” 

“I didn’t take you for a sympathetic-to-vampires kind of person,” she says. 

“Yeah, well.” He gestures grandly, and it’s then that her eyes fall on the half-empty bottle sitting on his desk. So he’s drunk, or on the way to being spectacularly so. She sighs. “How did he take it?”

“Remarkably well. He didn’t even try to eat me.” He holds out his arm, where blood has dried to a sticky, viscous coating on his skin. She supposes it could be worse. “Good sign, I suppose. And we even had a conversation without punching each other, so I’d say that’s progress.”

“So would I.” She hangs back warily, not knowing what exactly to do with herself. “So… he wasn’t… upset? I find that difficult to believe.”

“Oh, he was upset,” Trevor says conversationally. “But I think he’ll be all right. He said he needed time, so I decided to dump him somewhere with an actual bed because I’m a wonderful person.”

She laughs. “Keep telling yourself that, Trevor.”

“I will.” He smiles at her, that same cocky, disarming yet totally earnest smile that she’d ended up falling for despite how annoyed it made her. “Stay for a drink? The night’s still young.” He gestures to the velvety navy sky outside, and Sypha hesitates for only half a second before shrugging. “Why not?”

He beams at her, holding the bottle out. “It’s oak-matured. Good stuff. I found about eight bottles under the bed.”

She takes the bottle from him, lifting it to her lips and taking a sip. It’s strong, heavy and flavorful, and even the little mouthful she’d taken burns a fiery path down her throat and makes her fingertips tingle. Her eyes fall on the seven other bottles sitting innocently on the desk, and she feels her heartbeat quicken. It’s going to be a very, very interesting night, she thinks, and then she lifts the bottle and drinks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm so weirdly obsessed with those scenes in movies where a character has to stitch themselves up after they get shot or something and there's a bunch of close ups and shit and it's super bloody and graphic and gross but it's really cool at the same time and i've secretly always wanted to write a scene like that, hence!!! 
> 
> also hi pls feed me comments so I can convert them into writer fuel and provide you with more content. <3


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